i’m sleepy

"come again?"

"i learn more from thinking machine. human gender preference. attraction to same gender, means word 'gay.' all eridian same gender." rocky stands straight up. "rocky come out to grace now. all rocky plural gay, statement."

"...wow, that's... rock, i'm not sure it makes much sense to apply human ideas of sexual orientation to a monogendered species."

a long and judgmental pause. then:

“But it’s confusing!” If you take the time to educate yourself it’ll no longer be confusing. Otherwise you’re just gonna have to learn to be ok with being confused.

“But it’s weird!” You probably do weird things all the time. Everyone does weird things sometimes. Life goes on.

“But it scares me!” Is it hurting you? No? You’ll be fine. Being scared and being harmed are not always the same thing. Learn to tell the difference and then act accordingly.

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

and then you grow up to be a trans man and people will say to you “oh i thought you wanted to be a man, that means you have to put up with [abusive behavior]”

Happy pride to us all. And especially to any queer femmes out there just trying to exist who, like me, are using a VPN right now.

A quality VPN is a very important tool for privacy. They protect us from malicious scammers on iffy wifi, from what we do online being surveilled by the people and institutions that would do us harm. They hide the location we’re browsing from, so that creeps can’t mess with us at home. In a word, they help keep us safe.

They’re also essential for access to community. They let us dodge censorship and join the online world from the perspective that’s best for us. This means a lot as walls go up around queer digital life in the US, and also to people around the world whose love and identities are criminalized. In a word, they keep us alive.

So what are states like Utah and Michigan trying to do?

Ban them, of course!

At Fight for the Future, we’ve been slapping these lawmakers upside the head: holding a VPN Day of Action1, dragging Utah’s nonsensical law even as they delayed its rollout2, heaping shade on Michigan3, and generally organizing so that there’s an actual resistance to protect these crucial tools.

But we’ve got to be real: nobody’s really been funding this work except our grassroots supporters. And there is a lot more that we need to do.

So, if you can (and like I said, we get that we’re all just trying to exist out here), would you consider becoming a monthly donor to help us keep going on VPN defense?

This pride, we are really hoping to get support from 30 new monthly donors. We already have 6 this month - wanna help get us into double digits? To thank you, you can pick out a special piece of pride merch.

If you’ve got it, you’ve got it. If you don’t, don’t stress. We’ll keep fighting with everything we have!

Wishing you a little too much fun this June,

Lia at Fight for the Future

Footnotes:

TechRadar: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-want-to-make-some-noise-advocates-are-stepping-in-to-defend-vpns-and-they-need-your-help

Fight for the Future Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYDjrjoPIJa/

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

If we can't trust it to even verify our face or other things correctly.

Then why are people trusting it with their HIGHLY sensitive info like their IDs/selfies/passports/creditcards/etc.???

A late bloomer? No no, I’ve already bloomed. I’m just a different plant then what your expecting