yeah they might arrest some of you. figure out who's willing and able to take that risk and get them to the front. get the NLG to show up to your cons and for god's sakes buy them food and drinks. these are all things the activist left worked out years ago. if cons are important to you, you will, sooner or later, someway or another, need to defend them.
do you want to really have your trans friends' backs? do you want to make safety and space for joy for them? start thinking about this. learn from the people who've been doing it for awhile. teach your friends. turn your friend groups into affinity groups. learn how to look at a space and think about its tactical affordances. understand you might NEED these skills. the fascists will come for cis queers too if you let them take your trans friends https://350seattle.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/a-tiny-blockades-book-1.pdf https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/blockade/
actually i'm going to say this out loud. @matoakit raised the possibility of furry cons getting raided by the cops in states where being trans is illegal. i think the furry fandom should prepare for that possibility NOW by learning civil disobedience tactics. hotels have lots of weird escape routes and chokepoints that are perfect for soft blockades. set up comms systems to coordinate helping vulnerable people escape while most of the crowd keeps the cops away from them.
everything, absolutely everything i need to know i learned from the ursula k leguin short story _the day before the revolution_:
- fight injustice til the last fucking day of your life
- accept your mortality but also spit in its eye when you can
- be as horny as you want
(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-day-before-the-revolution)
shitpost
by placing the spork in the spoons slot of the silverware drawer rather than the forks slot, we reproduce the European patriarchal trope of marking as feminine that which cannot readily be categorized, and thus Othering it. it is also notable that the fork penetrates, while the spoon is receptive, and the spork is not regarded as being in the same category as the fork despite sharing its penetrative capacity. in this paper
love this thing where buses that run every 30+ min just... no-show. no service advisory, just MIA. glad i learned to drive, bitterly mad i'm being pushed to do it more by a systemic failure that could be isolated or not, but will almost certainly happen more and more on a long enough timeline. love to be perversely incentivized. & of course i'm one of the lucky ones [for now] who can make a choice that's better for me & worse for the world, instead of just wearily enduring the increasing suck
new cosmos
@nessotropheion accurately wrote in their notes from today's session: "xhaare having to constantly come out as a new starship in every conversation is exhausting"
Xhaare: "hello i'm Xhaare and my pronouns are star/ship" <waits with gritted teeth to have to explain shipself>
also Xhaare: "my 'i swear on my life that i did not murder Axatur Tempye, i could never have harmed such a beautiful man' hull stencil is raising a lot of questions already answered by my hull stencil"
thinking about Settled Work
https://patterns-dev.github.io/patterns/clean2/apl156/apl156.htm
u.s. state repression alert
Heads up for #PNW people: the feds are going after someone briefly arrested during the 2020 uprising. They tried to lure them out by offering to return their phone, which they confiscated during the arrest & have kept onto (extracting messages as evidence) ever since. Be careful & if you were in trouble back then don't assume everything's been forgiven or forgotten now. #FTP #ACAB
https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/psps-community-notice-regarding-fbi-harassment-indictment/
#ChatGPT and its ilk are effectively a large-scale DDoS attack on not only specific tasks (such as teaching, software maintenance and fiction editing) but on human creative inspiration, sense of self and ability to make meaning of the universe.
notice how they are
- creating work for us rather than saving us work
- automating inherently energizing and rewarding tasks such as making art rather than tiring and tedious tasks such as filing taxes
- flooding social networks with generated content that makes it harder to connect with real humans and build community
- distracting us with questions like “what if this machine is sentient?” which keep us from noticing and acting to prevent the suffering of actual humans
that thing where all search engines have become basically unusable because they’re stuffed full of AI garbage? i fear that’s about to happen to everything.
i don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.
@hypervisible
FYI
A new article by me at Fast Company: Maybe integrating mobile robots into everyday life isn’t a good idea....What might it mean for people when stronger and speedier robots are part of our daily routines?"
How do the rest of us get along when more manually dexterous, strong, speedy #robots are off their tethers, out of their cages, and part of the fabric of our daily lives?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90851035/are-we-sure-fully-mobile-robots-are-such-a-good-idea
job search, please share
Hey y'all, I'm a systems software developer with 5+ years of experience looking for a remote SRE gig somewhere trans-friendly. Are you perhaps looking for talent, or would know of somewhere like that that is?
My resume is at https://constructed.space/static/resume.pdf
I'd also really appreciate if you boost this and spread it around. Thanks :)
Beginners Guide to Spray Paint Vandalism
tl;dr Rustoleum 2x is the best widely available spray paint. Wear nitrile gloves. Don't get paint the day you paint, leave your phone at home, and be careful not to run out of room and make typos. You don't need to rush.
When I first got into using spray paint, I was frustrated at how little information there was online about what pain
https://rosecitycounterinfo.noblogs.org/2023/02/beginners-guide-to-spray-paint-vandalism/
#Allposts
The generation of adults moving into leadership positions today are in survival mode.
We are not looking out upon a vast paradise of resources like the generations before us.
We are looking out across a plane of rotting parking lots, civic destruction, political violence, economic manipulation, racial injustice, planetary pollution, and global disease.
We don't have the privilege to "build for joy".
We are too busy cleaning up after the generations before us. We have too much work to do.
The Mask of Inanna Audio Drama, was 10+ hours, now 57 minutes
A long time ago I made a 10+ audio drama with the Post-Meridian Radio Players (PMRP) called The Mask of Inanna - a modern reinterpretation to Old Time Radio. An old radio host is taken out of retirement to finish a show he never got to end - for mysterious reasons.
For a submission to the Dragon*Con Parsec Awards (which we won - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec_Awards#2012 ), I made a 57 minute summary of the show.
I've never really made it public before but if 10+ hours is too long for you, this basically provides all the major character and plot beats:
http://www.themaskofinanna.com/download/ADL-296-The%20Mask%20of%20Inanna.mp3
i'm a 40something nonbinary person who works in the lower rungs of the tech industry. i spend most of my free time on left politics, moving between the poles of broadly marxist-leninist and broadly anarchist organizing work happening in my town. this can be awkward.
my hobbies include baking, shooting, literary science fiction, the furry fandom and anxiety.
i took a DNA test, turns out i'll 100% be making bad jokes as the poisoned Pacific rises to swallow all i love.