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I have friends who live in my building, which is situated such that often the unit windows look out on other units; their recent solution to the issue of "sometimes I have to walk past a window half-dressed when I forgot to close the blinds" was to install some privacy film, which is a semi-clear vinyl film that you adhere to the window using soapy water. I thought it was a genius idea, and they very kindly let me use their installation kit after I bought some of my own. I think the result looks pretty awesome!

Dearborn is...less certain.

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Radio Free Monday (March 24, 2025)

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Radio Free Monday for March 24, 2025! RFM posts links to peoples' personal fundraisers asking for community assistance, on both Tumblr and Dreamwidth.

Ways to give

Tractorgoth is raising funds to move to Texas. First they lost all their belongings in a hurricane, and now they're losing their temporary place to stay. Read more, reblog, and find the donation link here or go straight to their GoFundMe..

Sophygurl's chosen family is 3 humans and 2 cats, and they're dealing with multiple health issues and big bills. Donate to help them all stay safely together. Read more, share, and find the donation link here.

Forlorn-kumquat is asking for help with a friend's deductible for an inpatient rehab program. Read more, share, and find the donation link here.

Recurring needs

Transgendz is is struggling to keep itself and it's roommates afloat. One of it's roommates will start chemo to fight cancer. Meanwhile, transgendz needs help with food and rent. Read more, reblog, and find the donation link here.

Remy, who is multiply disabled, is currently experiencing homelessness after domestic violence. They're currently in a motel, which has taken up all their SSI; and their application for housing assistance was denied. They need funds to stay in the safe housing of the hotel while they await a court date. Read more, share, and find the donation link here.

Chingaderita is raising funds to cover a major roof repair. Their roof fell in, and while no one was hurt, the hole in the roof is making the mold worse. Both she and her partner have chronic pain, and while they're searching for jobs, they're currently unemployed. You can read more and support the fundraiser.

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And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. Post items for my attention at the Radio Free Monday submissions form.

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If you don't mind the question: how old were you when you first realized you didn't want to have children (of your own), or did you always kind of know?

Difficult to say, to be honest, I just kind of never really had an interest in kids and the idea of being full-time responsible for a whole entire other person didn't appeal much. Now that I am encountering kids on a regular basis that's actually been reinforced because I love all three kids, I love babysitting them and seeing them grow, I want to be part of their lives, but I absolutely do not want to full-time raise them. To be clear, if asked, I would, because I do love them. And I'd do as good a job as I'm capable at it. But I wouldn't, you know, volunteer.

I read something on tumblr ages ago that I thought put it really well -- it was basically "For me, parenthood can't just be "not no"; it has to be a hard yes." I think it's important that if you want to be a parent you have to WANT TO be a parent, actively, because parenthood is a lot bigger and scarier than I think can be properly comprehended from the outside. And if you become a parent when you didn't want to, both you and the child are going to suffer for it. (This isn't touching on people who became parents and only then realized they didn't want children, that's a much more complex issue.)

Anyway, that's probably not a very satisfying answer, but yeah -- I think over the years it has become "It has to be a hard yes, and it's not for me."

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Manolith.

I regret to inform everyone that I have come up with a new synonym for "penis."

Knobelisk

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I was trying a new chocolate spritz cookies recipe which was a bit softer than my usual, and the "dromedary" shape came out of the cookie press okay, but the "scary Halloween cat" shape morphed into cats that maybe need to stop free feeding.

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Because it took me forever to find this out, FWIW these are known as "scintillating scotomas". I get them occasionally though mine arrive and depart without heralding headaches (they seem to be linked, for me, with blood pressure somehow)

If you start to see the scotoma in the center of your vision, sometimes you can head it off by taking aspirin, which will shorten the duration of the scotoma (and apparently may shorten the duration of a migraine as well but I can't speak to that).

To me, they look like carnations, only in neon and slowly whirling.

Person with migraine aura today: Ow ow ow my head hurts and all I can see is TV static :(

Nineteenth century doctors describing migraine aura with the manic horror of a lovecraftian horror protagonist:

At first it looked just like the spot which you see after having looked at the sun or some bright object; I thought it might be an eyelash in the way, or something of that sort, but I was soon undeceived when it began to increase…

When it was in its height it seemed like a fortified town with bastions all round it, these bastions being coloured most gorgeously... All the interior of the fortification, so to speak, was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liquid all alive. (Hubert Airy, 1856)

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File under "legit kitchen tools that nevertheless feel like someone's kink".

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It would be interesting to see what tag you choose for the kids - I've been calling my various not-mine-bit-adjacent kids everything from sproglets to tiny t-rexes to menaces-in-training. No one can settle on a single descriptor, including two sets of parents. :D

Someone suggested alphababies, which I love because it's the alphabet babies, but "alpha" has weird connotations and they won't be babies forever. I have a friend whose kids used to bring home friends who were struggling or needed a place to stay for a few nights (or a few years) and she calls them "Emergency backup children" which I kind of like. I suppose I could just call them the niblings, too.

I dunno, Emergency Backup Children is growing on me. Like, especially funny since I have no Regular Daily Children. :D

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A butt on the head might be quite continental

But dollars are a cat's best friend

Catnip toys are grand but they don't pay the rental

On a humble flat(pack)

Cardboard box for this cat

[ID: An image of an orange cat crouching with dollar bills folded up between her paws; it is captioned "I've bought my cat so many toys and the only thing she wants is cash. She'll carry it all around the house in her mouth and hoard it like a tiny dragon."]

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Bought a new notebook for...well, the cover explains itself.

(Available for $6 at Raygun.)

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What the fuck.

[ID: Both screengrabs are of the Atlantic's database which allows you to search and see if your work was fed into Meta's AI model. The top shows Joy Demora's works in LibGen; the bottom shows mine, including The City War, Trace, and Nameless.]

I'm not entirely read up on what all went on, but my understanding is that LibGen pirates and aggregates books to make them available for free, and Meta basically just front-loaded the entire aggregation into its engine.

My feelings about book piracy are complex and not fully formed, since it's not a space I hang out in. Because of that my feelings on Meta feeding pirated books into its engine are also complicated.

Mostly I'm just...surprised. I knew The City War was being pirated because I've seen it pop up on torrent sites, but Trace and Nameless were already available for free as PDFs. I suppose probably an ebook is easier for a program to assimilate.

I feel like to even have feelings about where my work goes and what it does I'm going to start needing a doctorate soon.

Meta Stole BOOKS for their Ai

I saw this on Bluesky and dropping the article link here. In the article there is a spot were you can search for a authors name.

Editor’s note: This search tool is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can read an analysis about LibGen and its contents here. Find The Atlantic’s search tool for movie and television writing used to train AI here.

@thebibliosphere they stole your books also. :-(

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Hell, I wish I had that level of drip. Unfortunately the vast majority of my looks are "I am capable of dropping $200 at Old Navy, but only just." Don't tell the readers.

(I realize his looks are possibly thrifted, but thrifting comes with its own challenges; I'm not saying I'm too broke to look like that, just not fashionable enough.)

[ID: Photographs and screengrabs of posts by Remexa on Reddit, a stylishly-dressed man wearing (first) a suit jacket with argyle sweater and (second) a bowler hat, red-striped dress shirt, and brown overcoat. The screengrabs contain evidence of his witty responses to users attempting to affectionately roast him.]

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The Chinatown 5K is back in Chicago!

This was one of my favorite 5Ks when I was a regular runner and I just registered as a way of getting myself to start running again. It's not that it was ever particularly fancy and the route wasn't what I'd call scenic (a great deal of it was next to a freeway) but it had a real community spirit, and the pre- and post-race was fun -- lion dancers and a raffle and usually some cool sponsor/vendors. I think it was put on by like, one woman, or at any rate she did most of the organizing, and in 2020 she cancelled it and just never brought it back, which is understandable.

But it looks like a youth nonprofit has taken it over, and they've redone the route -- being familiar with the area I like the new route better, and I like that you can opt into fundraising as a runner and get your registration waived if you raise $250.

Anyway, Chicago runners, it's July 19th if you want to come out and support the revival of a really fun 5K. :)

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Dearborn's daily existential crisis usually hits somewhere between 3 and 4 pm.

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I don't think romantic relationships are really all that different from friendships, but there's a kind of artificial quick intimacy that's different from the often (for me) accidental building of a friendship. Like, you learn another person's dialect, as it were, but it's more organic in a friendship. I feel like I'm having to relearn how to be in a relationship as though it's a language class.

I'm semi-dating someone (it's complicated) and most of our conversation is via text. Which is fine, but they have this quirk where sometimes they just respond to something I say with "Okay." No emoji or elaboration, just "Okay."

Feels kind of dismissive, right? Maybe sarcastic or passive-aggressive. I could go into a whole narrative of how I worked it out but functionally I realized pretty early that I wasn't being dismissed or belittled -- they were using it as a shorthand. "Okay" has a number of levels, but primarily it means "I received your text message and read it, but I didn't really have a response to make, so I'm just saying this, and I'm not going to text until I have something else interesting to say."

Which is a lot for four letters, but I kind of like that they have this little shorthand and that it was fairly easy for me to parse it out. It would perhaps have been better to actually explain what "Okay" meant, but no communication is perfect and I figured it out pretty quickly, so it works for us. It's interesting to try and figure out someone's private semiotics that way.

Also feels oddly at times like I'm dating a Vulcan, which is kinda fun.

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"Welcome to PolkDonalds, can I take your order?"

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Sam - I know you’ve mentioned in the past that for monthly donations, you’ve used some sort of special account or app or something but I’m having trouble remembering the details (just that you’ve mentioned that when you put money into this thing, you don’t have access to it any more). Do you still use that service? What is it called? Would you be willing to discuss the pros and cons you’ve encountered with it?

Yes! I use Charityvest, which is a Donor Advised Fund. I'll throw the details behind a cut :)

A Donor Advised Fund or DAF is a kind of bank account (usually, not always administered by banks) that serves as a bag-of-holding between you, a financial institution, and a nonprofit. Basically you put money into the DAF, and the moment you do that it's considered a charitable donation; you can write it off your taxes for that year, but you can't claw that money back. The fund has custody of the money now. The reason it's called "Donor Advised" is that the money sits there until you advise the fund where to send it. In theory the fund doesn't have to listen to you, but in practice if it doesn't, it won't last long as a DAF.

The advantage for this in legal terms is that you can dump a bunch of money into it, write the money off in one year, and donate the money to multiple nonprofits across future years. The advantage for me, and for most people who aren't millionaires, is that you can automate and anonymize your monthly giving in a way that still lets you control it.

Like, if I want to give $20 every month to the Anti-Cruelty Society, I could just go to their website and sign up to do that. Most nonprofits offer a monthly option. But if I need to miss a month or increase or cancel my giving, I have to call them and have them do that for me, I can't do it myself on the website.

What I can do with Charityvest is tell them "Take $20 out of my bank account every month and give that $20 to the Anti-Cruelty Society." But because Charityvest has a login and a dashboard, if I need to cancel that giving I can login and tell Charityvest "Stop giving $20 a month to the Anti-Cruelty Society."

I put $70 into Charityvest every month and I give $20 each to three separate nonprofits. I give $70 and not $60 so that at the end of the year, I have $120 extra that I can give as a one-time donation somewhere. I don't really have to think much about my giving month to month. DAFs also let you anonymize your giving; you control whether the nonprofit gets your name, phone number, or address, which of course many people like because they don't want extra mailings. They don't take a few from either you or the nonprofit because they make their income lending and investing the money between you depositing it and them donating it.

The big downside is, of course, that if you suddenly need $120, what's in the DAF is not available to you, it doesn't belong to you anymore. Charityvest also has a $20 minimum donation -- you can put as little or as much as you like into the fund each month, but you can't donate less than $20 to a single nonprofit at a time. You also can't tell them what day to make the donation; they take the money out of your bank on a day of your choosing, but they donate the money on their schedule (all of my giving happens on the 20th of the month, for example). So if there's a special day where someone would match your giving, you can't tell Charityvest to give on that day.

You also can't give to gofundmes or through the nonprofit's website -- you can only give through Charityvest's website and only to accredited nonprofits that you can find on their list. Now, to be clear, they do not curate this list: if the org is registered legally as a nonprofit in the US, it's on that list, so it's not like they're preventing you from giving to certain things.

So, pros: Automation; anonymity; control over repeat giving; tax benefits.

Cons: usually a minimum donation per nonprofit; lack of control over date of giving; loss of access to cash even though it still exists in the account.

For me it's been very much worth it; the automation is super helpful and if I want to make a one-off gift I just do it outside of the DAF framework. But it really depends on what you want and how much control you want over which parts of your giving. Hope this helped!