crochetingwhale

[crochetingwhale]

[crochetingwhale]

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[crochetingwhale]

i love this shit i need more examples

[crochetingwhale]

I love that my cat loves me and feels so safe with me that he trusts me to take care of him when he's sick, because for what other reason would he choose to jump up on my desk and immediately vomit on it

[crochetingwhale]

Show some respect, people.

[crochetingwhale]

My personal brand of humor is "horrible, useless advice delivered in an authoritative way" and this is the result of it

[crochetingwhale]

My personal brand of humor is "horrible, useless advice delivered in an authoritative way" and this is the result of it

[crochetingwhale]

everyone riding the train today got 250 xp after a level 32 dracula wandered onto the tracks

[crochetingwhale]

The first time I heard the word ‘lesbian’, I was 9 years old.

A group of girls were saying that the new girl in our class was a lesbian. They said it in a hushed whisper, the same way you’d say a swear word. Noses wrinkled, eyes glinting, mouths twisted in disgust.

I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that it was bad.

Some time after that, I found out what it meant, and I remember, vividly, the drop in my stomach when I realised that there was another option - that I didn’t have to live with a boy when I grew up after all, I could just live with my best friend instead. Hold hands with her. Be with her, like that.

I also remember the sinking feeling when I realised that it wasn’t something I was supposed to want.

After that, every game of Barbie I ever played, Legos, any toy, would have a lesbian storyline - but only if I was playing by myself. I wanted to see it, to make it real and not just something whispered in hushed tones as an insult, and I’d press my Barbies faces together and make them kiss and wonder, wonder, wonder, if this was real, if this was a thing two women actually did.

I used to lie in bed at night and wonder if everyone felt like this.

The year after that, I remember overhearing my parents talking about a kiss between two men that was going to be shown on a popular British soap. My dad said he couldn’t believe they would put ‘something like that’ on TV before the watershed.

The night it was on, I crept downstairs and peeked through the railings on the stairs and watched the kiss. It was the first time I’d seen any people of the same sex interact romantically, and it was met with noises of disgust from both of my parents. I, however, was transfixed. It was real.

It was real… and oh, how my heart sang!!

For a few seconds at least, before I noticed my parents reactions over the loud thumping of my own heart. Their repulsion. Their hissed words.

I went back to bed, and stared at the ceiling.

That was the night I stopped playing out my romantic fantasies with my toys OR in my mind, squashed it all into a little box and tried very, very hard not to be that.

And for years, I succeeded. I pretended to have crushes on members of boybands, gossiped with friends about who I thought was ‘cute’ and ignored how my heart fluttered when one friend in particular let me brush and braid her hair. When we got to the age where we all started mixing with boys our own age, I agreed to go on dates (ie holding hands at the local macdonalds and going for a walk by the river) with anyone who asked, and I would agree to be their girlfriend until it got to the point they wanted to touch me or do more than peck me on the lips and I’d break up with them in a panic, telling myself that they just weren’t ‘the right one’ or that I ‘wasn’t ready’.

I’d still only ever heard the word lesbian in the context of something you shouldn’t be.

At the time, there was a statistic being bandied around by some people in my class (goodness knows where it came from) that 1 in 10 people were gay, and they were all trying to guess which three out of our class were lesbians. And I remember sitting there, feeling my cheeks getting warm and my stomach churning and realising, in that moment, that it might be me.

It might be me.

And I wanted to die.

I dont need to talk any more about that, or the rest of my journey - but I’d like to tell you now about my own child. My oldest.

At nine years old, my son called to me through the bathroom door whilst I was on the loo. “By the way, mum, D is my boyfriend now.”

It wasn’t an unexpected moment - my child had worn dresses and carried dolls and only ever been friends with girls and expressed their desire to be a girl from a very early age - but it wasn’t quite the moment I had envisioned it being. Not with me sitting on the toilet, and definitely a few years earlier than I’d expected it to happen!

But they had told me who they were, and after getting off the toilet, I hugged them and thanked them for telling me, and they said “I know what the word is, mum, the word is gay and it’s okay.”

I had to go and have a little cry after that.

The word is gay and it’s okay.

How powerful those words are, and how different my child’s experience of that word was to mine.

Do you want to know what the difference was between their childhood and mine?

Since my children were young, they had books that had stories with two mums, or two dads… single parents, nonbinary parents - all manner of configurations and love. They saw it on television. They heard their mother talk about her gay friends, went to a lesbian wedding, and if their mother ever referred to a future for them, never specified the gender of any future partner - or, indeed, implied they should have a partner at all.

My child never, at any point in their life, thought that being gay was something they shouldn’t be.

The same could be said when a year later they told me they were nonbinary, and we celebrated their new pronouns and identity with cake and a Doctor Who marathon. They never had any doubt in their mind that I would be anything other than accepting, loving and embracing - and it means the world to me.

I wrote this out mostly for me, because it’s been on my mind - but also to say that it fucking matters. That representation matters. That all those people who say they “don’t mind it but don’t need it being shoved in their face” and who get their knickers in a twist over a Pride parade and complain about gay people being all over mainstream media need to understand that it DOES matter. That it NEEDS to happen. To be visible.

Because it means my child gets to grow up in a world where it never crossed their mind that their gender or sexuality might not be okay. They grew up knowing they were unconditionally loved for whoever they were.

I want that for every child.

I can’t go back in time and undo all the damage done to the little girl playing so quietly in her room, afraid of herself, afraid of the world, growing up to believe that the tenderest parts of her were unlovable.

But I can try to help create a world where nobody else has to feel that way, ever again.

[crochetingwhale]

[crochetingwhale]

[crochetingwhale]

she nothing on my nothing til i nothing. celibacy

[crochetingwhale]

Showing my cock things it's never seen before

1. The inside of a sprite can

2. h..hopital

[crochetingwhale]

Remember when that girl tried to say that firefox was bad because a former CEO was homophobic and I pointed out why that was a terrible take (throwing out the baby [open source non-google web browser with great extensions] with the bathwater [dipshit who left like ten years ago and also developed javascript and i don't see you ditching all sites with java for your principles]) and she went and looked through my posts and tried to call me out for supporting hyperconsumptive capitalism and encouraging anorexia because I'd reblogged a photoset from a runway show and I was like "bitch I don't care about fashion, I've got a latex fetish" and then she blocked me?

That was very funny.

[crochetingwhale]

[crochetingwhale]

When you’re sorting the tank filters and a big boye wants cuddles. 

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