Talk Skyrim to Me

platforms and tech companies have been taking significant steps over the past few years to comply in advance.

one thing is clear: OS-level verification and app-level autosurveillance capabilities that use facial scanning and deep metadata analysis are fundamentally incompatible with a free internet.

make your calls and emails as soon as possible.

Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these proposals on their merits, lawmakers are attempting to move them all at once under an ultra-expedited process. 

Justice League: Dream Girls - A DC Pride Event #3

The issue is, there is a clear difference between fandom staples (like crack and whump) and what comic fanon has become.

Comic fanon has become a monolith in comic spaces where thousands of people celebrate and encourage illiteracy, where fanon concepts are lauded as facts, where non-readers speak as authority on comics, where many many fanon concepts are rooted in racism, misogyny, ableism, xenophobia and classism, where any character that is not a Bat or Bat-adjacent is maligned and mischaracterized to be a prop for their nearest Bat (Hal is Bruce's punching bag, Bart is Tim and Kon's baby). Even the Bats are flanderized into tropes.

Everyone who likes comics and other characters has to endure at some point someone who has never bothered to get to actually know these comics being told their comics are stupid or their non-Bat character is only good if tied with a Bat.

It gets exhausting after a while, so fics that might be rightfully crack or whump, depending on the content, are met with suspicion because they feed this aggressive fanon machine.

They contribute to a problem, and it's a problem that thousands of people outright refuse is a problem because they benefit from the problem (they like the content even if it's racist).

So I get told to kill myself for correcting fanon myth held as fact (Clark abandoned Kon, no he didn't), even phrased in the most gentle of ways.

Then I get people telling me that Bart is the r-slur and a sweet innocent baby (he's capable and his friends' age, curses all the time and tried to get his mentor laid).

Then I get told I'm ableist for pointing out that the "silent Cass trope" is racist.

Then I see fanon concepts held as FACTS where the Green Lanterns are terrified of Batman, or Barry Allen can't solve a crossword, or Clark Kent (an investigative journalist) can't solve a mystery and they need Batman to help them.

Any opposition to this is frequently met with accusations of hating fun, or gatekeeping, and fanon fans refuse to acknowledge that they are being at least little bit shitty.

Anyway, fanon content creators are free to create whatever they want, but comic fans that don't want to deal with being told their comics are stupid have every right to call out inappropriate behavior. At some point you have to admit maybe there is a problem, and you're contributing to it.

me: *instantly flashes back to every moment i procrastinated and wasted*

This is me when I read:

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.