A gentleman values discretion

"Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.

At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity. 

That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly. 

That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.” 

Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources. [...]

can someone explain what he's talking about i got distracted by his giant jiggling honkers badonkers

So, today is the big day. I'm getting surgery which I HOPE will fix my symptoms, though I hear recovery will be rough. To be honest I'm kind of scared. I hope everything goes well for me. ;-;

I want to thank all of you so much for all of your support through the past year while I suffered through my medical issues, and especially for your support in the past month. I wouldn't have been able to get this surgery without you, so thank you all so so so much.

I also wanted to make this post because I decided to delay the caption contest a week later than I usually start it (at the beginning of the month) because I wanted to be recovered for 2 weeks before I needed to pick winners and write up the post for it (and link all the entries to the participants, etc) since I'm told that early recovery will leave me very low on energy and in pain.

I'm making this a separate post than the caption contest because I want the caption contest post to be focused on people submitting captions and not make it about surgery or having the comments be well-wishes for surgery (though I certainly would welcome them!). If you want to, you can leave those in this post. :)

Anyway, so that's just an update I wanted to post and to explain why the caption contest is so late.

Thank you all again so much, I couldn't have made it to today without you all

Sous La Glace, Georges Leonnec for La Vie Parisienne, 1926