Yes, kids just say shit. They have no filter. That doesn't make it any less humiliating when your child sits near me on the bus and incessantly grills me on why I have a stick when I'm not old. Or laughs at us for things our disability causes. It doesn't take away the hurt when they bully a disabled classmate. For a large part these things could be avoided if you just taught your kids to respect us. It's really not that hard.

We are in the New Browser Wars. This time there’s a helluva lot of money up for grabs, because a lot of it is about running those ads. Monopolies are bad for consumers.

AdNauseam is an adblocker that generates false clicks on the ads it blocks, which costs the corporations that pay for them money.

Privacy Possum messes with the tracking data collected about you, rendering it essentially useless

TrackMeNot generates random search terms across sites, meaning that any data collected about things you actually search is buried in a sea of random bullshit. Makes it very hard for people to figure out what you’re actually doing. You can block terms in the options, which means it won’t search for anything incriminating on your behalf (I think the word bomb is blocked by default)

WhatCampaign replaces tracking analytics used in website code with data that can’t be used to track you. I’m pretty sure it replaces it with “fuck off” by default.

harry potter is one of the largest intellectual properties in the entire world. there are so few people in the west who don’t know what harry potter is. claims that fandom is “advertising” for harry potter are for this reason invalid in my opinion. accusations that we are responsible for perpetuating awareness for an intellectual property that my 85 year old neighbor knows about does not hold water. were this a smaller IP that less knew about, i think we would have a different situation on our hands. deplatforming hate mongerers can be effective, but the idea that harry potter will ever be deplatformed in our lifetime is a joke, and therefore i think the best we can do is to continually extricate JKR from fandom engagement with the HP intellectual properties.

i really feel for the people who make the types of callout posts jalesidor is referring to, or who send hate to the people in this fandom informing them that jkr is a terf, as if they don’t know. their pain is real, and it is shared by me and many in this fandom. i believe it is a misplacement of that pain to target fandom participants, though; they can send as much hate as they want to JKR, and she will never read it. but if they send hate or make callout posts about fandom participants, that might feel like it can effect more change, even though, as I said, I personally do not see fandom participation as benefiting JKR or her views in any empirical way. the moment that changes, and fandom becomes something that is quantifiably propping JKR up, i will reassess. i do not think that is the situation we are in.

i think every person’s engagement with HP fandom is a very personal thing. for me, frankly, it is a long running balancing act between enjoyment and pain. there are long periods where i think that the JKR Of It All is too much for me, and i’ll have to leave. there are long periods where i wonder where i’d be without drarry fandom, which has been such a fruitful and welcoming place to explore and engage with my transness in a world that is not hospitable to people like me. 

for many people, this pain outweighs the happiness. that was me up until very recently when i discovered fandom. still to this day, harry potter official works make me extremely upset to engage with. but drarry fandom, to me, feels so far removed from the IP and JKR that that pain doesn’t translate here - case in point, i was working on a drarry fic just last night and listening to a movie score playlist, and i teared up when a song from the HP films came on. i couldn’t get more than thirty seconds into it without skipping it - there’s too much pain there, while fic itself is so removed for me that i don’t think of JKR at all.

my point with this example is that everyone has their personal limitations with what they can comfortably engage with with HP fandom. some people can watch the movies and read the books, some people can’t even see logos without being upset, and there has to be a level of respect for everyone’s relationship with engaging with this fandom as we navigate our own limits. there has to be a level of practicality about what effect fandom participation has on upholding HP’s grip on the culture, which i have a hard time believing is any.

i have infinite tenderness for people who have visceral reactions to the original media, and that very particular trans discomfort at engaging with something that in some aspect could cause damage to the community is a special kind of pain. But also at the same time there is a particularly us/far west centric style of mindless punishment executed by members of a marginalised community to other people in that same community, all in the covert service of a greater system that then gets away with vile things - and a majority or out group that remains blissfully uninformed. to some extent, the way that tight knit minorities survive by staying within their own bubbles is also their downfall in a reactionary age where liberalism and capitalism has conflated identity expression with consumption. as you move to the outer reaches of the eu and further east, states and systems don’t work exactly the same way, at least because of how much drastically more limited freedom of identity expression is and also because there’s simply less room to choose what you consume and engage with in the mainstream - and how (meaningfully) vocal you could be about it in public. it’s fucked how she’s divided us in this way as well.

It’s ironic that this is the place I’ve learned to experience trans joy, but it’s not a coincidence–this pocket of fandom has been cultivated very deliberately in direct response to jkr’s bigotry. I doubt it would exist in the same way if things were different. I also doubt whether I would have been able to find it in the first place, if it were located elsewhere. For me, art and artists like this have not been easy to find, but have made a world of a difference in my life.