Sarah's Stuff

I HAVE FOUND MY FAVOURITE POST ON THE INTERNET

And because i know people won’t even bother to click and check the article itself i’m gonna screencap it, it’s fairly short, give it a read:

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

Do you gender trans people correctly even when they're being absolutely terrible people? Do you refuse to use the r-slur against someone who suicide baited you but is neurodivergent? Do you refuse to snark at a mentally ill person who is being genuinely unpleasant, "go take your meds!"

Do you allow members of marginalized groups to be terrible people without judging their entire demographic for it? One of the most invisible yet vital forms of privilege is the right to be terrible people as an individual rather than as a group. Do you acknowledge that there are bad people in every group, that it doesn't make their group less worth fighting for? Or do you shake your head if you happen to get mistreated by some who belong to a group and insist the entire group is awful and not worth your allyship?

One second, he pins them as prime suspects on sight; the next, he's working alongside them to solve the case. The man (who faked being an undercover Interpol agent, by the way) says the guy whose estate is being solved was actually murdered? Well, in that case, it's got to be murder!

Quickly, you concluded that the butler did it; all is well and good. You recovered the mystery stolen painting (with the help of a couple you're growing surer by the second are some flavour of criminals, but Sterling seems to be chill with that fact, so it's probably fine). Now all that's left to do is to tag it as evidence and wrap this whole thing up - oh, what did you say? Your boss's rival(?)-turned-suspect-turned-partner-turned-general-pain-in-the-ass vaguely implied that something about their procedure might be a little bit iffy? Apparently, that alone is enough to send Sterling into an absolute frenzy, demanding that everything be double-checked twice over.

No, wait, 5 minutes later, the couple is back, confessing to stealing not one but two paintings, but only for like, a little bit, so they could do some backyard vodka-paint test. And they're claiming all of the paintings in the collection are fake. That's got to be the breaking point, right? We're arresting them! Never mind, we're back on their side, working with them to figure out what the hell is going on.

After a too-long day, you figure it all out (well, not you, the criminal duo does, but you're just so fed up with the case, you don't even particularly care). The curator did it and then accidentally died in pursuit, but at least you got an answer. You need a drink. You need to return to England, away from this circus, so your boss can start acting semi-normally again.

Learning about the history of the queer community does more than make you a better community member. It also just makes life seem less overwhelming. In a world where your feelings of powerlessness benefit the powerful, seeking historical precedent for being the underdog has worth.

Learning the stories of queer anti-fascists making zines to scare off Nazis is fun (Claude Cahun). Exploring the history of a radical newspaper that somehow turned into a cultural touchstone is a drama-filled journey and often so funny (The Village Voice). Reading queer peoples' diaries is generally a wild ride (Vaslav Nijinsky).

The reason so many people are drawn to these stories is not just because they are morally important, it's because they capture attention. They are interesting, and weird, and sometimes hilarious.

Queer history is important, of course. But it's also pleasurable, and understanding that is often the best motivation to start learning. As someone who is constantly researching this subject, the self-pitying cries of "but no one taught us this!" is getting a bit old.

As AI-native experiences proliferate, millions of consumers are already encountering unauthorized versions of popular characters across chat, voice, gaming, and content creation platforms. Sixth Wall was created to give creators, rights holders, and partners a trusted framework for bringing characters into these new experiences while preserving authenticity, safety, and commercial rights.

People who hate AI are people who hate it for a lot more reasons than just where the training data comes from, so this announcement isn't going over very well

This is the only known photo of the first trans woman to have her gender legally recognized in Switzerland.

In 1914, Adine T. sent a letter to her local police to grant her a pass to dress as she pleased. She petitioned that "I be granted permission to live as a woman, to wear female clothing and to pursue female occupations, and to be considered a woman before the world in all and every respect, since my emotional feelings are totally feminine and I feel unspeakably unhappy in male clothing."

Her gender was so clear that even the conservative Swiss government had to recognize it. Obtaining permission to live as a woman "is a matter of life and death for me," Adine added.

The commercial visibility of Pride over the past few years has often excluded the voices of those most marginalized.

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.

You've probably seen me preach about Standard Ebooks because they standardize a lot of public domain books into a standard epub format with nice fonts, chapters and and so on, making it very nice to read on tablets and e-readers.

They've released some of the new books that just became public domain so I thought I'd compile the standouts and link directly to them for the ease of my followers here. All these books became public domain today and these versions are also public domain as stated on their site.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (the earlier serialized version became public domain last year but the main version that the movies are based on became public domain today)

The first four Nancy Drew mystery novels by Carolyn Keene

The Secret of the Old Clock

The Hidden Staircase

The Bungalow Mystery

The Mystery at Lilac Inn

Others include

End of the World by Geoffrey Dennis

Ash Wednesday by T.S Eliot

As I Lay Dying by William Faulner

and many more, they in fact have a whole public domain day write up