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So I thought it might be a good opportunity to highlight some organisations that are working to promote Roma rights, and some ways, alongside donating, that you might be able to support them.

The European Roma Rights Centre carries out strategic litigation to support Roma rights, as well as doing advocacy and research. You can sign up to volunteer for them here; one volunteer-run project currently live is called Challenging Digital Antigypsyism, and focuses on identifying and reporting hate speech on social media platforms.

On a similar theme, Minority Rights Group International has a campaign toolkit on countering cyberhate against Roma. The focus of the campaign is Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.

In the UK, Friends, Families and Travellers works to end racism and discrimination against Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people and to protect the right to pursue a nomadic way of life. If you're in the UK, you can ask your MP to sign their pledge card. And if you witness discriminatory comments in politics, you can report that here.

grace & rocky hug in zero-g <3

(no-xenonite version under the cut!)

Good letter template for contacting your MPs re the new code of practice. We have a month. Make the biggest stink you can. As stated at the link, this template is useful as it contains specific Procedural questions, which are harder for unsympathetic MPs to shoot down than exclusively Ideological ones (though there's space for that in the template too!). It took me less than ten minutes and I wrote like two paragraphs.

If you're in the UK, this is one of the easiest ways to do Anything about this bullshit. If not, you very well might have friends or followers who are, so send this their way. Regardless of where you are, please do all you can to support the trans people here.

I've been staring at this question for about five minutes and I honestly don't know what to say for this. 😅

There's certainly been some changes, but most of them have been fairly superficial. (Venture capital and Hollywood money rushing in, then rushing out, that sort of thing.) The core of it remains fundamentally the same: it's an amazing medium for getting a story out there, but boy howdy it's tough to make a show that finds an audience that's big enough to pay for the cost of production, let alone make any kind of a profit. There's a lot more shows now than there were ten years ago, which I think is a net positive. We've all spent a lot more time listening to audio fiction, so our formal literacy, storytelling sensibility, and structural familiarity have all gone way up. That's a good thing.

At the same time, you do notice some interesting conversations happen around the peripheries of the medium. I feel like for the past two years I've been hearing a lot about increased spatial sound design, and the desire to hear scenes where everything sounds completely consistent to the way it'd sound if you were there all the way through the scene. Which is a great tool up to a point, but so much of audio drama's power comes from the way in which its elasticity conceals and then dramatically unfurls information. There's a point at which totally realistic, spatially realized design takes away from that voltage - imagine Wooden Overcoats if you always had to hear Antigone breathing and moving around if she was in the room, for example. It's a lot of sacrificing what's cool and powerful and unique about the medium in order to hit an arbitrary mark. I, for one, remain skeptical of its utility.

“Hey man, your main character isn’t sympathetic enough, could you fix that?”

I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone in the entire world.

posting a bit late, but this was my contribution to the WOE.BEGONE fanzine: WOE.BEZINE 💫 The zine is full of thought-provoking essays, amazing art and fics that brings out the best of the show:) amazing work from all contributors. make sure to check it out if you haven't already!