Nobody here but us chickens.

I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away

here's my dad and i taking it away

luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).

the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.

there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.

if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.

but I'm hearing there's a NSFW-friendly ko-fi alternative built on atproto that's actively in the works, and being vetted by lawyers right now. as torrent-princess (OP) says, you should be able to swap out payment processors while keeping your account intact. this matters since even if stripe removes support, you'll still have a shop and all of your links intact. (ATproto is an infrastructure that bsky is built on, but is far bigger than bsky with far more opportunities.)

additionally, the Free Speech Coalition is working on a credit union specifically for adult work (including kink art) - here's the link so you can add your interest & support. Since this will be built by sex workers, there'll be far less risk of being debanked for spurious and puritanical reasons.

on a domain TLD level, there's an initiative here for a .furry domain built from the ground up by seasoned furries; it's unclear whether they'll support NSFW, but it's yet another promising turn of events for a group that's been similarly affected by censorship.

I think there's something to the "gendered versus gender neutral scripts" idea but I'd attribute it less to the feminist revolution of the sixties and seventies. After all, women in the workplace are still recognizably women, and women having jobs is not a recent feminist invention. Rather, I attribute the shift to recent generations growing up with the internet...and specifically, the text-based early internet.

Pre-internet, having a "penpal," was a rare novelty; most actual human interaction was face to face or at least over the phone. The internet introduced the idea of having people who you talk to day after day, week after week, month after month, without ever seeing their face or hearing their voice. All you had was text and a pfp, so there was no way to reliably know whether these people in forums and chatrooms and message boards, who had become a real presence in your life, were male or female. I mean, sometimes they told you outright, but not always. You could make guesses, but you were frequently wrong. Asking directly was kind of awkward...and of course, even then, you had no proof that someone was telling the truth. And most of us internet young'uns also had the experience online of being mistaken for a different sex, and then when it came out, realizing, "Oh, huh. This person was interacting with me for the last few weeks wrongly assuming I was a boy/girl." And also realizing that maybe you had a better rapport with them when they were working under that mistaken assumption about you.

So Millennials, the first generation to really grow up with the internet, developed a gender neutral mental model for interacting with people. They developed a mindset where you waited and looked for clues to someone's sex or gender rather than just knowing based on their face or voice.

On the one hand, yes, the evolution of the internet and its formative effect on our generation and younger has been really, really crucial to the development of our cultural concepts of gender identities and nonbinary genders and so on. I'd claim a variant of this which takes it a little further: it's largely because of the development of the internet as a place to exist in full-blown digital social spaces at the time that it did that we've seen our recent fairly abrupt explosion in transgender identification and self-identity-based concepts of gender; I suspect this couldn't have taken place without the internet being in the form that it is.

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

it would be a mistake to think that this represents the natural behavior of chickens.

it would be a mistake to think that the social displacement harms we do to each other as marginalized people under a great deal of stress, under capitalism, represents the natural behavior of people.