The Roost

I haven't seen anyone talking about this and just wanted to make a quick post on here.

Akihiro Miwa recently passed away peacefully june 20th, and was not only a drag queen and a queer icon, but also the japanese voice of Arceus in the movie Arceus and the jewel of life, as well as the witch from Howl's moving castle and Moro from Princess Mononoke.

yes graves sketches instead of doing work

(Source)

Federal law has long required that members of certain independent commissions — e.g. the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission, etc — can only be removed for a good reason. By a 6–3 vote (with all Democrats dissenting) SCOTUS has just blessed Trump's effort to fire anyone who he doesn't like, irrespective of federal law.

I work at a library. We do this thing where, every so often, we weed the collection. It hurts to see books go, but it's necessary to make sure there's room in the library for new materials.

I have seen so much support for the library in text, and I've seen folks pass around those beautiful "queer your library" flyers. Keep doing that. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you HAVE to turn your words into action. We MUST remember to actually go to our local organizations and libraries and actually, with our own fucking hands, interact with these materials we want to see more of.

My branch is medium-sized for a library, maybe a little small. We don't have as many materials as I'd like, but we have fundamentals. Tell me why, even with all the verbal support I've gotten from my local community for the library as a resource for our LGBT+ community, every single trans biography and a good chunk of our vaguely queer theory books were on the list. This isn't a scheme to take the books off the shelves, it isn't another bigoted American governmental push. The only thing we look at when we weed is how long it's been since the last time the item was checked out.

Three years.

No one in my community interacted in any meaningful way with the few books on trans life and history we physically had on the shelves for three fucking years.

I promise you the materials you want and need are there, but this isn't a horde. This isn't a static safety net. You have to use them. You MUST use them or, in the future, maybe in three years, they *won't* be there anymore.

I'm also a librarian and queer books are almost always cut first when we have to weed for space or prioritize new releases over old items because no one reads them

I will say, when I worked at a large downtown location, we had a "browsing card" that we would check out items we found taken off the shelf and left on a table, as an example of a book that had clearly been read, just not checked out by anyone

it's possible queer books do actually get a bit of unfair treatment in this regard because people may be nervous or outright scared to check them out onto an account with their name on it. so they get browsed at a much higher rate, but if a library doesn't have a specific system in place (or need for it) to count browsed items, then it looks like they aren't being used and they get weeded

for other librarians, a browsing card is a great idea if you have enough staff for the extra work / enough items left out to justify it

for patrons, check out queer books even if you don't read them! you're not lying or committing any type of fraud. you're keeping books on the shelf long enough for pride season when people are interested in checking them out again and for people scared to use their own accounts or who don't have library cards

for anyone nervous about using their library card, libraries do not keep search histories of what you check out!! this means even if the government does come back with a warrant, *wet farting noise* too bad! it doesn't exist!

It feels like such a small thing, but all movements are made up of small things! We have this mindset that in order to get everything done, everyone must be doing their (or *the*) absolute best at all times. But not everyone can do the same things, to the same degree, with the same amount of productivity or success. Not everyone can; sometimes, they're the ones that need help. Sometimes people just need help.

This post is very much so intended for the people who can. I've seen a lot of replies from folks who say they don't have to (or don't think about) checking out or requesting queer books from the library specifically because they *can* buy them, can pirate them, or already have them in their house or on their computers or phones. But in instances like that, keeping these books in circulation is less for you and more for the people who can't. The folks who come to the library, who don't have access to internet--or even electricity--at home and would never--have never--been able to interact with this "ubiquitous queer community" we have here online who has made so many of these. materials so avaliable to the rest of us.

And... if I can be a little frank. Sometimes the hyperaccessibility of these materials online (through pirating, cheap e-book copies, etc) gives people a false sense of security. It implies that these things are an infinate resource, good for "When I get around to it".

And often, you won't. There's so much to read and so much to do. So much to download and so much to sit down and stare at for hours. That kind of mental scope puts books in people's hands (or phones), but never in their heads.

I live in a province that is currently trying to ban queer books from libraries, and as a library patron, this is terrifying. 95% of the books I read are from the library and a lot of them are way out of my budget to buy personally.

Making Queer History would not exist without the school library I skipped class in to write articles. It would not exist without my friends with library cards for their universities sharing them and getting me access to rare texts. I would not be able to read as much as I do without Libby and Hoopla. If I have ever given you a book recommendation, know that I likely got it from the library first.

I cannot overstate the importance of protecting libraries and checking out queer books. And I want to say thank you to everyone above for being as passionate as I am about queer books in libraries.

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

Part of the reason he didn’t see the interview was because he’s taken a step away from social media — something that felt necessary this season as some of the commentary became too intense. “I’ve had to kind of step back. Because sometimes it goes into these weird places where if fans disagree about a character, they start to turn on each other. That is not what this is supposed to be,” he says. “All through my career, I’ve had a pretty good relationship with social media, but now, seeing how all this is unfolding, I’m kind of reevaluating what that looks like.”

There's a reason online discourse and offline discourse often feel so different. And I think a lot of people blur that distinction in ways that end up excusing some genuinely awful behavior.

The people you're talking to online are still people.

They have their own experiences, perspectives, biases, and histories that shape how they engage with art—just like you do. You absolutely can engage in challenging conversations. In fact, I think it's often healthy to do so. But conversations are a two-way street. That's the one thing people seem to forget when they decide to jump into discourse.

If you're entering a conversation expecting others to listen to your perspective, engage with your points, and take your thoughts seriously, then you also have to extend that same courtesy to the person you're talking to. Otherwise, what's the point? And if that kind of engagement isn't something you're interested in, that's okay too.

Block. Mute. Disengage. Move on.

Curate your online experience however you need to. There are plenty of ways to have constructive conversations about media. Plenty of ways to discuss what isn't working for you, where you think something falls short, or why you disagree with a particular interpretation. But those conversations stop being productive the moment they become needlessly hostile. And fandom spaces thrive on discussion. They thrive on people bringing different perspectives to the table, because fandom has never been one thing.

It's the person who watches something after work and wanting to spend a little more time in that world. It's the person who wants to spend hours dissecting a character's motivations. It's the person who loves a story enough to criticize it because they want more from it. It's the person who's simply here to have a silly goofy time with something they happened to enjoy. All of those people belong here. That's THE entire point.

Fandom is a table with enough room for all kinds of engagement.

So if encountering a different opinion immediately makes you want to become cruel, hostile, or vicious, maybe that's a sign to step away from the conversation for a bit.

Log off. Take a walk. Do literally anything else.

And if nothing else, learn a little internet etiquette before deciding to take your frustration out on strangers. Because disagreement isn't the problem.

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

Minke whales breaching: I will launch myself out of this ocean like a f***ing surface-to-air missile to seek and destroy my enemies

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

Our neighborhood is near a field that happens to be home to at least one coyote. I have seen that coyote wander down the road and people have even spotted it in fenced backyards before. I'm sure one reason it dares to wander into backyards is because it knows there are cats wandering freely around here.

The red tailed hawks in the area may not be large enough to carry off most full grown cats, but that doesn't mean they won't try.

Raccoons aren't exactly nice to cats either.

And i can easily point out several houses, including my own, with flowering plants out front that could absolutely make a cat sick or worse. Lilies, for example.

Even before tackling the problems of cars, malicious people, poison from pest control, or the ecological damage cats themselves cause, just the fact that other people will decorate their own yards with plants that can poison a cat should be enough of a reason to keep them inside!

You. You get it.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.