damndonnergirls

[damndonnergirls]

Okay, this is pretty incredible. A 3D artist, consulting scholars and archaeologists, worked for a year and a half in Blender to create a reconstruction of pre-Columbian Tenochtitlán, complete with the surrounding landscape. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and—at least to me—gives a wonderful impression of the city as a place where people worked and lived and worshiped

[damndonnergirls]

genuinely so scary that you can't access the page on the ssc website that guides you through changing your sex designation. so so fucking scary. they are already making our lives harder. they are already taking what little resources we have.

[damndonnergirls]

A brief bullet-point list of the executive orders Trump signed yesterday. The tiktok thing is a distraction. If you are in the US, please read this. It will take less than 5 minutes. Gift article so no paywall

Some of the items on that list:

Freeze federal hiring except for military and immigration enforcement.

Bar asylum for people newly arriving at the southern border; declare migrant crossings at the southern border to be a national emergency; suspend the entire Refugee Admissions Program.

Terminate DEI initiatives across the federal government.

Recognize only two sexes; remove protections for transgender people in federal prisons.

Withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the pact among almost all nations to fight climate change.

Declare a national energy emergency, a first in U.S. history, which could unlock new powers to suspend certain environmental rules or expedite permitting of certain mining projects.

Try to undo Biden’s ban on offshore drilling for 625 million acres of federal waters; undo Biden-era tailpipe pollution regulations and other energy-efficiency, fossil fuel, and pollution regulations.

Open the Alaska wilderness to more oil and gas drilling.

Eliminate environmental justice programs across the government, which are aimed at protecting poor communities from excess pollution.

Withdraw from the World Health Organization.

Ensure that states carrying out the death penalty have a “sufficient supply” of lethal injection drugs.

Create the Department of Government Efficiency with Elon Musk in charge.

[damndonnergirls]

i wrote a twin cinema poem about two gay soldiers in wwi

context: the two sides, read separately, are the two soldiers thinking about their futures with each other. when read together, it's a reflection of their final thoughts when they die together struck by bullets <3

[damndonnergirls]

A PSA about the latest Vulture article to drop about Neil Gaiman -

Do not fucking read it if you are not in a stable state of mind.

Triggers include, but dare I say, are not limited to -

Sexual assault and misconduct

Anal, digital, oral, and vaginal rape

Forced urine/faeces consumption

Vomit/forced vomit consumption

Financial abuse

Gaslighting and manipulation

Sexual conduct in front of a minor

Sexual humiliation and degradation

Disordered eating, anorexia, and bulemia

Suicide, suicidal ideation

Self-harm

Child abuse

Scientology

Most of these things are discussed in explicit detail multiple times.

It's harrowing and heartbreaking to read. Even if these are not specifically triggers of yours, I beg, take a second to really have a think about whether you're in a place to take this on.

[damndonnergirls]

i feel like this is important enough to put on here.

if you have any videos on youtube make sure this is unchecked

[damndonnergirls]

… I thought OP was talking about making everything “a stone’s throw” from everywhere.

But yes, large rock access also important.

i think everyone deserves a large rock a short distance from their home. i dont like that discussions about walkable cities never include plans to allow wider access to large rocks. the people need large rock

[damndonnergirls]

disabled people are worth whatever cost or resources is needed to keep them alive. disabled people are worth it even if they don't live long. they're worth it even if they will need extra support and resources for every day of their life. they're worth it even if they spend all they life indoors. none of it is wasted. none of it is in vain. time, effort, money, resources spent on a life are not wasted. these things have served their purpose. the joy of someone's existence is not undermined by not lasting forever. there's no meaningful point, some threshold where you can say "okay this is enough. after that it's not worth it." it's always worth it.

[damndonnergirls]

The upside is that there was an absentee ballot recount in our most populated and very blue county and it pushed us over for a blue Senate win. So yay for that because I was fucking miserable seeing the Republican win there too.

[damndonnergirls]

I know there’s an existing post somewhere, but here’s the list of OBGYNs in the USA and other countries that will perform tubal ligation (aka female sterilization) without arguing with you

[damndonnergirls]

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.

But something else happened.

Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.

“So it’s really been a mystery — why do children stop dying at such high rates from all these different infections following introduction of the measles vaccine,” says Michael Mina, a postdoc in biology at Princeton University and a medical student at Emory University.

Scientists Crack A 50-Year-Old Mystery About The Measles Vaccine Photo credit: Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

[damndonnergirls]

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

[ID: A poem titled: Kupu rere kē. [in italics] My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems. This advice came from a well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card and an English accent in her mouth. I have been thinking about this advice. The convention of italicising words from other languages clarifies that some words are imported: it ensures readers can tell the difference between a foreign language and the language of home. I have been thinking about this advice. Marking the foreign words is also a kindness: every potential reader is reassured that although you’re expected to understand the rest of the text, it’s fine to consult a dictionary or native speaker for help with the italics. I have been thinking about this advice. Because I am a contrary person, at first I was outraged — but after a while I could see she had a point: when the foreign words are camouflaged in plain type you can forget how they came to be there, out of place, in the first place. I have been thinking about this advice and I have decided to follow it. Now all of my readers will be able to remember which words truly belong in -[end italics]- Aotearoa -[italics]- and which do not.

Next image is the futurama meme: to shreds you say…]

(Image ID by @bisexualshakespeare)

[damndonnergirls]

please donate to get e-sims to gazans

gazans don’t just need these e-sims to contact the world. they need them to contact other people during their worst and loneliest hours.

i can’t even imagine how it must feel, to be so afraid and alone. to just need someone to talk to.

we often call friends and family to talk to when just we’re having a bad day. and this… these people are living day by day, unsure about the next hour, surrounded by screams, bombs, artillery and rubble.

gazans need to connect now more than ever. not just to tell their stories, but to connect to other humans. to feel a semblance of normalcy in the devastation around them. to have some sort of comfort amidst all the destruction. to be able to contact their family members and make sure they’re okay. to hear their voices. to keep their hopes and spirit alive.

please please donate. please help connect gaza. please reach out and let them know you’re there.

please keep talking about them. keep posting. keep protesting. keep connecting with them, and connecting them with the rest of the world. don’t let anyone forget what’s been happening to them for even a second. the world has spent almost a century in ignorance and silence, but not anymore!

don’t let their oppressors isolate them. israel is trying their best to break their spirit. don’t let them. we must stand with the palestinians and let them know we’re with them until the very end.

the palestinian cause is our cause. their fight is our fight.

remind them that they’re not alone. don’t you dare give up. not when they’re still fighting. and even if they stop.

don’t stop until palestine is free.

-6/12/23-

[damndonnergirls]

Translation of Internalspeak to Externalspeak

A P2 post I made internally a month ago on October 5th about what's next for Tumblr leaked as a screenshot. This is super rare, so I'll try to translate what was said for y'all here. It was also incomplete, so here's the full thing.

We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have its revenue and usage above its previous peaks. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. (Hat tip.) It is better to have tried to summit the peak and failed than never to have tried at all. We have learned a ton on the journey, and honed skills we can use to approach other summits.

This is me saying we've worked on Tumblr for four years with ~200 people full-time, and spent well north of $100M above revenue trying to turn the site around, but it hasn't yet. That sucks, but I also want to recognized the effort of everyone who tried and gave their best.

As we talked about in the past, if it doesn’t work we’ll have a backup plan and set up the business so we don’t need to let anyone go, we’ll just need to reflect and decide where else we should concentrate our energy together. This plan is happening now: the majority of the 139 people in Bumblr will switch to other divisions. No plans for any switches in Happiness or T&S.

Bumblr is the internal team name for the product side of Tumblr, and the link was to our internal company directory which showed the ~140 people currently in that team. There are also other teams that work on Tumblr that aren't affected or changing, so this tries to say specifically who's impacted. "Happiness" is our term for customer support, and "T&S" means trust and safety, which is the team that works on fighting bots, spam, dealing with illegal stuff, etc. While Tumblr was burning cash, we managed the rest of the products and company to support and subsidize it because we thought that would turn it around.

We assume the first choice for everyone working on Tumblr is to continue working on Tumblr, but we’re going to give everyone an opportunity to have a “top three” ranked list of what other things around Automattic they would be interested in working on. To infuse some Tumblr mojo.

As we've been telling the Tumblr team for over a year, if we can't get revenue up we need to switch some portion of them to work on other things within Automattic that do generate revenue and can support their salaries. We offered a survey where people could rank stack choose what they would be interested in working on instead of Tumblr. The team has actually been performing really well in their work, which is why we aren't letting people go, they just haven't been getting results, which usually means we're working on the wrong things and we should try working on different things. We've also learned a ton working on Tumblr that I think will make our other products better.

The leak was actually incomplete, here's the rest of the post:

This survey will be posted early next week, alongside some 2-minute videos from WP.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Day One, Pocket Casts, WP VIP, .Org, Applied AI, Texts, self-serve advertising (Blaze), Newspack, Pressable, and Gravatar talking about why you should consider picking them as one of your choices. In the meantime, feel free to bounce around the products linked on Automattic.com to get a feel for them as a consumer and see what tickles your fancy. We’ll crunch through those preferences with what the opportunities for growth are in the various products and businesses, come back with a plan, get feedback on that, and then post the final plan. The switchovers will happen on December 31, so we start 2024 completely fresh. We are shifting from the mode of “surging” on Tumblr with tons of people to get it to exciting growth, to working on how we can run Tumblr in the most smooth and efficient manner. Pretty amazing things in the social and messaging space have been accomplished with small teams, so I’m actually quite curious to see a smaller and more focused Tumblr’s performance in 2024.

What followed were a bunch of comments that actually caused us to update the survey, other teams around Automattic posted videos pitching Tumblr folks to work on them, we did the survey, and then posted a first draft of where people could go actually just this week. (Which is maybe why the leak happened, perhaps someone didn't like the proposed changes first draft.) As a reminder, there still are no people switching, it's just planning for what will happen on December 31st, 2023.

As I mentioned this was posted on October 5th, a few weeks before we announced the acquisition of Texts on the 24th, which actually didn't leak. I do appreciate whoever shared the screenshot trimmed it down to not prematurely break the Texts news.

So now you have the full post I made, it also got 45 comments which I'm not going to share out of respect to the privacy of colleagues, but you can imagine it generated a vigorous debate internally and a lot of discussion about how to make sure we're setting up Tumblr for success in this next chapter, a lot of tech discussion about maintenance, libraries, open source, and how small teams can move faster than big teams, if they have the right environment. I'll take further questions in the Asks.

[damndonnergirls]

“Based on [their own] arguments, Saturday’s no voters would have rejected the [Australian] federal constitution at a referendum because it did not contain sufficient detail, it made distinctions based on race and it did not require people to be treated equally. It is therefore most curious that one of their other arguments was that the constitution is a sacred document that should not be meddled with.”

– Anne Twomey, professor emerita at the University of Sydney, who was a member of the constitutional expert group that advised on the voice referendum. Full article:

[damndonnergirls]

"The referendum was a chance for newcomers to show a long-refused grace and gratitude and to acknowledge that the brutal dispossession of our people underwrote their every advantage of this country."

[...] "Talk not of recognition and reconciliation. Only of justice and the rights of our people in our own country. Things that no one else can gift us, but to which we are entitled by fact that this is the country of our birth and inheritance."