SpookyGoosey

stop buying into the idea that nonviolent activism is useless, rather than (by far) the most effective form of protest

stop falsely claiming that BLM accomplished nothing and that most citizens “don’t care” when people are murdered by the state

start understanding that most of your neighbors care about your rights, and their own

Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.

The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.

The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.

The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.

Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.

The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.

Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".

He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.

Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.

The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.

The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.

The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.

TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).

This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".

This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")

X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.

Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.

The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.

One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.

And so we are still here. We erect our camps of sustainable solutions. We cook our vegan food and hold our assemblies. We march, we block, we stage theatres, we hand over lists of demands to ministers, we chain ourselves, we march the next day too. We are still perfectly, immaculately peaceful. There are more of us now, by orders of magnitude. There is another pitch of desperation in our voices; we talk of extinction and no future. And still business continues very much as usual.

At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?

But she shows that beauty doesn't end when you get old. Aging isn't the end of your story, just another phase of it. That old woman is beautiful, and it's good that she knows it.

INTER/EXHUME is a 48 page zine exploring themes of death, life, and the way that we are haunted by both. Referred to affectionately as a “ghosts and gardening” zine, the works in INTER/EXHUME grapple with echoes and new beginnings, from the traditional ghost story to dialogues with medieval charms. INTER/EXHUME is strongly rooted in the past— but as we exhume, it looks to the spring. Inside, you’ll find 4 short stories, 2 poems, and custom title cards for each! 

I’ve been working on this since last Autumn, and I couldn’t be prouder of how it’s turned out. Keep a special eye out for the contribution of my guest writer, D. Maskill, right at the end! 

And it’s available now on Itch.io! You can get it on a pay what you want basis here. Currently only the digital version is available– depending on demand, I’ll make a physical copy available too! 

i started hormones when i was 14 because psychological and reversible medical treatment did not ease my dysphoria enough to improve my quality of life! me, my family, and my doctor(s) decided that hormones would be the best next step to help me, so that’s what we did! trans kids DO take hormones, and they DO occasionally get surgery, and that is COMPLETELY FINE!! because preventing a family from accessing what they and care providers decide is the best healthcare for a child is CRUEL AND UNETHICAL.

multiple studies show trans people who are forced to wait until late adolescence or adulthood to medically transition have worse mental health than both their immediate peers and continuing on into adulthood.

flight