Newsies is Life

The setting that prevents your work being used to train AI models is turned off by default! I had no idea about this until now! Artists, go to your settings, click “visibility”, and turn on this setting! Protect your work!

Go to your blog (you have to do this for each individual blog) and the visibility tab

It's this last option here

You're holding an actual child to higher standards than you hold yourself, but it's the child that should be removed from public and community spaces. For your comfort.

If you are using your issues to force kids out of public spaces you can go choke on your own saliva. A grocery store is sensory hell on a good day (and that includes without children screaming) but I would never advocate for someone leaving public because their child, who just so happens to be upset or having sensory issues of their own is now screaming or crying in that same store.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

this woman—stephanie turner is her name, because i think people should know it so this shit can ruin her life—regularly fences cis men and wins because fencing is fucking co-ed

i know that is in the screenshots already, but what i can add which isn’t in the screenshot is that i personally know and have fenced some of the people listed in that “competition history” screenshot, including some of the cis men which she beat. i know from fencing them myself that these guys are good, smart, capable fencers

that said, even if i didn’t know them, i could tell you a lot of these guys are solid. do you see that column labeled “rating”? being rated means they’ve placed very well or won medals at prestigious or decently sized tournaments—E is the lowest rating (but still difficult to get) and ratings go up to A (and U means unrated). if you look, you can see she beat a few rated fencers in that screenshot, some of them male!

another thing i know about stephanie turner is that she fences at a club my friend’s brother works at. she regularly beats said brother, who is 6’4 and 200lbs. i’ve never met this brother, but if he’s anything like my friend, he’s a damn good fencer with years of experience. stephanie turner is GOOD. per my friend, she probably would have won the bout she took a knee on. she really did not need to pull shit transphobic shit and i guarantee she knows it.

all this shit about fencing cis men really does not matter, to be clear. being a woman beating men doesn’t make stephanie a good fencer—it doesn’t even make her a notable fencer. every afab fencer who is good enough to beat other fencers beats amab fencers. the first fencer i beat as an afab person was a cis man who started the sport at the same time as me just bc we were at the same general level. because again, fencing is co-ed. i just am explaining all this to show how damn stupid dying on this hill is (and the fact she for sure knows how damn pointless and hateful it is)

because fencing is NOT a strength sport! being stronger or taller than your opponent, like how a cis man would stereotypically be vs a cis woman, isn’t necessarily an advantage—strength can absolutely fuck you up if you don’t know how to manage it, and if you know how to use it, being shorter than your opponents can actually be an advantage

if anything, fencing a stamina sport, which something you can very much train no matter your gender if you put in the work. more than anything to do with strength or speed, though, fencing is a strategy sport. there is really no reason to gender segregate it. a lot of tournaments do, but plenty tournaments DON’T, and most clubs you go to for practice and drills and learning fencing will be co-ed and have you constantly fencing against “opposite sex” fencers

(half related—one of the best foils on my fencing team is a trans woman who sometimes fences in the men’s brackets in tournaments and regularly beats cis men)

if stephanie turner is a good fencer—which she definitely is—she knows all of this. that fencing is more about stamina, that strength and height mean nothing, that the only thing that really matters is your strategy.

stephanie turner was literally just doing this to be an asshole. the fact she’s getting money for it is fucking disgusting. i hope she faces some damn consequences for this shit, because it’s such stupid, hateful bullshit, especially for a sport where that “biological advantage” shit really and truly does not matter

Why do we need - or even want - two separate leagues for men's sports and women's sports? The gender pay gap, the recognition gap, the trans sports "issue" are all solved by having only one league for these sports (except, of course, for bigotry like we see above).

Men have the advantage - on average - in some sports, sure, that's the argument. But time and time again, stories show that the best female athletes can and often do defeat the best male athletes (in fact, that's why competitive skeet shooting was gender segregated in 1992).

For example, car racing. Danica Patrick being smaller and lighter than the men she races against is such an advantage that the league made a lot of noise about handicapping her by putting extra weights in her car. (To the best of my knowledge this did not happen.) Why is she the only cis female car racer anyone's ever heard of, when being small and light is an advantage in driving fast?

Or horse racing! Practically every teenage girl in the world used to want to own a horse, or loved horses, or wanted to ride horses. Jockeys are small men, typically, because being small and light is an advantage in racing if something is carrying you. And the strength difference between men and women is a. all in the upper body, which is basically not really used in racing a well-trained horse and b. negligible in comparison to the strength of the horse. I don't care how strong a dude is, he's not using his manly strength to guide the horse. The horse is much stronger than him, full stop. It's the horse's training and the trust and respect between horse and jockey and the jockey's strategic mind that wins horse races. All of which are traits cis women have just as much as cis men if not more so in some cases, considering how many cis men are subjected to an upbringing that trains them to think empathy for an animal is a weakness. Why are all the top jockeys not cis women?

Long distance running. Over a distance, speed doesn't matter as much as stamina and endurance, which science has proven cis women have a slight advantage, on average, over cis men in. So... why do cis women not dominate marathons?

Also, why is long distance swimming not a popular sport? Is it just because we don't have mile-long swimming pools? Because we could use natural bodies of water and have boats coming behind the athletes to grab them if they falter and look like they're gonna sink. Could it possibly be because women, with higher endurance and more body fat for better floatation, would be better at it?

Or -- a slightly different angle. Men's professional basketball has become all about "how tall are the athletes you can recruit." Women's professional basketball is still about skill and strategy, not about absurd heights and which team can field more incredibly tall people. I'm not saying short women dominate in women's professional basketball, but I am saying that women exist at the upper extremes of height much more rarely, so women's professional basketball is basically "normal human professional basketball." Why is it so unpopular and unhyped in comparison to men's? Why do the men make so much more money, when they're playing a sport that the vast majority of fit and trained athletes couldn't win in, because those fit and trained athletes aren't in the 99.9% percentile for height? Women's basketball ought to be more interesting than men's... but funny that.

Soccer (aka football everywhere but the US) is a sport where a low center of gravity is valuable. So is hockey. In fact, I, a short and unathletic autistic girl, did incredibly well at floor hockey in high school, in comparison to the taller girls who were better athletes, because I could get under them to get the puck. Therefore why do cis women not dominate those sports? Particularly soccer! Cis men excel at upper body strength but the strength levels of cis men and women's legs are pretty close to equal, and you're not allowed to use your upper body strength in soccer! Women should have an advantage over men there. They do not.

It's because all of the "men are better at sports" bullshit is the patriarchy talking. Men have to be better at sports than women because women have already proven we can compete with men in every other way. Individual female athletes who are excellent cannot be allowed to compete with excellent men because what if they win? What does that say about men and women?

And that's why this "trans women shouldn't compete with cis women" thing was bullshit from the getgo. (Particularly when it's applied to trans girls, who if they are under 13 or they're on puberty blockers don't have significant advantage over their agemate cis girls.) Trans women do not have systemic advantages over cis women in most sports -- not if they've fully transitioned, because you need a continuing supply of testosterone to have the muscular advantage over cis women -- and a fuckton of sports are ones where cis women should own trans women because on average trans women are taller, and sports exist where greater height is a disadvantage.

You're in Berkley, California in 2005 and you're minding your business going into a Walgreens. Which is like a Boots here. So I'm going in there cause it's a Sunday night. Just-I live in New York, I go in there to get a mask, a facial mask.

So I'm walking in and I see someone walking out, has beautiful hair down to here, (gestures below the shoulder) lip piercing, beautiful, beautiful. I see this guy and we look at each other and I'm like 'oh my god' and I'm on the phone and I come outside. We look at each other and he's talking to this young woman, and she seems to be angry at something. So its a lot of like- *mimes yelling* and he's looking at me and she's all *mimes anger*

And I'm like, what's going? So I'm like ok let me get off the phone. I get off the phone, they walk off down the street. But he keeps looking back and I wave, but he just keeps going. And then I'm just dumbfounded and I end up in a Blockbuster across the street, and I don't even know what I'm doing I decide to look at my watch and it's 8:03. And I look outside, I think is he here? I think maybe I'll come back next Sunday and he'll be here. I'm that kind of hopeless romantic.

Cut to three days later, I'm trying to buy a used computer and I'm just scanning craigslist. They have that over here right? I'm scanning craiglist. So I thought, maybe I'll place one of those Missed Connections ads. I wonder if they work, cause I would read them on the subway. I go to page 2 of them as I'm reading and I see: 'saw you outside of Walgreens - Berkley. He placed an ad for me two hours before.

Sterling K Brown: Come on, brah.

I jumped up I'm like, are you kidding me? That's me. He described me with my faux hawk, it was 2005. *laughing* And I was like, get out of here. So we met up three days later. We had our first date. I was trying to be a good boy and go home. He said, can you stay over? I said sure but let's just cuddle. We cuddled. I thought he was asleep. Four o'clock in the morning, I couldn't sleep and I say to him, "I think I love you and you're about the change my life." And we've been together almost nineteen years now.

Sterling K Brown hollers. "Yooo! Are you serious? Oh my god!"

Just canceled my account (not that I used it that much). But I won’t permit this. Via @unaminh.bsky.social:

IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.