magpiedminx

[magpiedminx]

I’m still tweaking it, but something the Visible app has hammered home these past few weeks is just how much energy my body expends existing.

Currently lying perfectly still and I’m in the ‘exertion zone’ because I’m in so much nerve pain it's making my heart rate elevate.

Being in pain is burning up my pace points. I’ve used two since I woke up this morning simply by being conscious.

Anyone who dismisses the effects of chronic pain on the body or tells you to exercise to push through it is formally invited to throw themselves into the sun.

[magpiedminx]

I’m still tweaking it, but something the Visible app has hammered home these past few weeks is just how much energy my body expends existing.

Currently lying perfectly still and I’m in the ‘exertion zone’ because I’m in so much nerve pain it's making my heart rate elevate.

Being in pain is burning up my pace points. I’ve used two since I woke up this morning simply by being conscious.

Anyone who dismisses the effects of chronic pain on the body or tells you to exercise to push through it is formally invited to throw themselves into the sun.

[magpiedminx]

I would NEVER recommend going to a site like https://sportshub.stream/ (use a good adblocker)

afternoon! Sorry to bother, just wondered if you had any idea how to watch the 4 nations face off from the uk? Have been struggling to find any useful info from the nhl about viewing outside north america! Any wisdom gratefully received - thanks! :)

I actually have no idea!! I've got NHL TV so I watch everything there, but if it's not included then I don't know. I've done a cursory search but can't find much??

[magpiedminx]

Once again - Chromium is not Chrome.

hello google chrome refugees

don't use any of these browsers, they're also chrome

Here are my favorite firefox plugins for security/anti-tracking/anti-ad that I recommend you get

please get off chrome google is currently being investigated for being an Illegal Monopoly so get outta there okay love you bye

[magpiedminx]

Funny about that...

[magpiedminx]

For no reason here is a library story

[magpiedminx]

The simple act of wearing a respirator (KN95, N95, or better) can save your life, if they're used properly and every time you are in a public place/outside your home. Wearing a mask helps prevent transmission of airborne viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, RSV, influenza, and more. Despite profit-based claims otherwise, we are still in a global COVID pandemic. Mask up to protect yourself and others from illness, disability (Long Covid), and death. For more information about (Long) COVID, masks/respirators, clean air, disability justice, and more, visit resistcovideugenics.carrd.co, linktr.ee/act_up_mask_up, covidtoolbox.com, covid.tips, and/or find a local mask bloc near you (maskbloc.org).

Credit: @_copy_of_a_copy

[magpiedminx]

When I adopted Amy Cat everyone went on and on about "Calico lungs" because supposedly calicos meow more than any other cat. (Insert eyeroll) No, she was 90% blind and doing a sort of echo-location thing.

i must (unfortunately) report that Boy Cat™️ belief is very real. it was a biiig thing on tiktok I believe, I've seen a lot of it on there. meanwhile my female cat cries when I'm not in the room with her 💀

Man, it sounds like the new tortitude. First we stereotype based on appearance, and now sex. Real progressive y'all. :(

[magpiedminx]

He is purring because I am eating salmon. Dave this isn’t for you!

[magpiedminx]

[magpiedminx]

[magpiedminx]

Crawl

I keep thinking about power, and corruption, and revelation.

I really like that Robert Caro line about Bob Moses--the idea that power doesn't always corrupt, but it always reveals. When you give a guy the power to do whatever he's always wanted to do, you find out what he's always wanted to do.

I think about slavery, and I think about my fourth-grade math workbook.

I lost the workbook, early in the year. No idea how. This would have been 1993, 1994, decades before kids did their math exercises online. You had a paper textbook and a paper workbook and you tore out the workbook pages and turned them in for homework. And if you lost the workbook, at least at my tiny church school where all the books were produced by an expensive fundie publisher in Florida, well, there were no replacements. So I had to ask my friends, every day, to let me photocopy their workbooks in the office before they did their homework so I could do it too. This was difficult because I was a gawky, "ugly" little girl with big glasses and a bigger vocabulary, and I didn't have a lot of friends. Or any friends, really. So what I actually did was beg a different person who disliked me every day, hoping they'd get over it by the time I cycled through the class again.

You're probably wondering about the slavery.

The early modern slave trade is tricky to teach children about in a school where half the teachers and most of the parents think white supremacy is a good idea that just hasn't gotten a fair shake. But my teacher tried, and to her credit, she started with an exercise designed to teach us that the idea of owning human beings is fundamentally fucked up.

Unfortunately, she did that by instituting slavery.

She explained what slavery was, and encouraged each of us to write a list of what we would want our own personal slave to do for us, if we had one. (I know. I KNOW.) She suggested things like carrying our books or fetching our lunches from our cubbies at lunchtime. I remember seeing everyone else writing a lot, and wondering whether I was doing the exercise wrong. I didn't want anyone else touching my stuff or doing things for me that I could do for myself. It felt weird and cruel to demand such things. I decided that the only valid purpose of any kind of servant, or assistant, or whatever was to do things for you that you COULDN'T do for yourself. So I wrote down: Let me copy your math workbook before you do your homework.

The teacher collected our papers, paired us up, and announced that half of each pair would be the other half's personal slave for the week, switching positions the following week. And then she revealed the twist: the only things any of us had to do as "slaves" were the things we had written down that we wanted our slaves to do for us.

There was a lot of complaining, of course, but we'd all dug our own graves, as it were. I remember the teacher coming by to collect my list, looking down at my one sentence, and smiling a little. The only kid in the class who needed to copy a workbook was me ... and I didn't have one anyone else could copy. I would spend my week of "slavery" doing absolutely nothing because I had barely scratched the graveyard dirt. My partner was utterly disgusted when she saw the single useless obligation on my list. She was baffled when I looked at hers and asked her very politely not to do any of that, please, unless the teacher said she had to. I think I eventually let her fetch my books once a day out of a vague sense of good sportsmanship and not wanting her to get a bad grade in the unit.

For the next two weeks, I watched fourth-graders performing their personal slavery fantasies for one another. I particularly remember the most popular boy in class knee-walking to fetch books from his partner's cubby and complaining the whole way. I remember thinking: Why would anyone want to see someone else crawl?

That was the part that never made sense to me: the shockingly common desire to see a stranger humiliated. It didn't seem like anyone enjoyed seeing it, so why had so many kids wished for it?

That's the image that runs through my head every time I hear about a famous artist being abusive. For CEOs, it makes sense; that seems like a life path that attracts people who like exploiting other people. Same for politicians. But artists? Who goes into ART expecting to become powerful? I can only assume that, for the rare artists who make it big, it's kind of a shock. It's unplanned, on some level. Lightning striking. Sure, they usually got help from societal privilege and rich parents, but a lot of talented nepo babies DON'T make it big. There's obviously some luck involved for those who do. And they probably don't have a clear idea what to do with power beyond their own vague impulses, the ones they would have written down in that fourth-grade classroom.

And I keep wondering, when stories come out about artists being abusive and the people around them all normalizing it: was I really the only kid who just wrote down let me copy your (blank) workbook?

Fourth-graders aren't adults, of course. Plenty of us are little shits as kids and manage to function in a society when we grow up. Maybe more of us would leave the list blank as grownups. Certainly more of us would spot the trap the teacher was laying. But as I listen to some of my neighbors talk about the election and what they'll do to their "enemies" when their "turn" comes, I wonder if I'm weirder than I thought. Maybe I'm the freak for not wanting to see anyone crawl. (I mean, if it makes you happy, you do you, but don't trouble your knees on my account.)

I think about the Neil Gaiman allegations. About him and his five-year-old son (allegedly) giving a vulnerable young woman humiliating orders, and people around them just ... rolling their eyes. Not thinking it's weird and cruel, just understanding the impulse to see someone crawl.

I wonder what I'd do. Not in an if-I-won-the-lottery way, more of an if-I-saw-a-terrible-accident way. What would I do with that kind of power? Would I still be the kid who just wanted to have the same homework everyone else got, or would I discover I've become someone who wants to see crawling? Does power corrupt? Is that why the most popular boy was the one with the wildest demands?

And if power doesn't necessarily corrupt, but it does reveal ... how weird is it that it so seldom reveals an empty list?

Of course, people acting decently doesn't often make the news. The only celebrity to come through the Neil Gaiman accusations looking good is Michael Stipe, who hosted a gathering at his home for the victims to meet and support one another and who doesn't seem to have harmed anyone in the process. Maybe all his neighbors are okay empty-list folks too, and they're not mentioned because he happened to have the good fire pit.

I don't know. Sometimes I think I was the only kid in that cult who heard do unto others as you would have them do unto you and thought that sounds like a pretty good idea.

I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this. I know there shouldn't be so many people with the power to make others crawl. But I can't help wondering how much of the perception that all of us, deep down, want to see that is the truth ... and how much is monsters lying to themselves out loud.

Maybe we hear them say Doesn't everybody want to see someone crawl? and we're afraid to say no, actually, that's just you.

Then again, maybe my girlfriend's right, and it's the 'tism.

[magpiedminx]

That has to be the most humiliating way to describe one of Earth's most terrifyingly effective predators.

[magpiedminx]

This is his response to the article with GRAPHIC details of the sexual assaults he perpetuated. Warning: Sexual Assault/rape and it's detailed. https://archive.ph/9rxQg

[magpiedminx]

Just so that people know...

Facebook/Meta's just-announced change in its fact-checking and moderation policies (which would, among other things, allow users to refer to LGBTQ+ people as "mentally ill"), and its sudden vanishing of trans- and nonbinary-friendly themes, has made it plain to me that some of the book-series-oriented spaces I've maintained over there for years are no longer safe places for users, especially younger ones, to be.

I have therefore begun deleting them.

The Middle Kingdoms page (being both the smallest and the one now potentially most dangerous to keep) was the first to go: I nuked it about ten minutes ago. (Naturally I checked it first to make sure nothing of any note was going on in there, and also naturally, I took a backup.)

The Young Wizards page will be the next to be deleted, probably tomorrow. The Ebooks Direct page there will also be deleted over the weekend. Neither of them was all that busy, ever: but that's not the point here. Meta is no longer a safe or appropriate place for them to be. (It doesn't hurt that many of FB's employees are furious about this policy change too... but their boss, I firmly believe, doesn't give a shit about that.)

The DD Facebook page may suffer the same fate. My personal "main" account...? I have a lot of older friends over there for whom FB is their lifeline and main digital platform. I'm going to have to think about how best to handle that. It may be that there will be no more public posting from me there: just DM'ing. ...And I'm still working out what makes the most sense to do about the Middle Kingdoms Instagram account, and my own personal one. Neither of them has been heavily trafficked, and I may nuke them too.

(sigh) All this comes as something of a wrench. But at the very least, as regards the part of my creative work that contains LGBTQ+ themes and characters, I refuse to leave any of it there. To do so would risk having its continued presence seen as support for the platform's boss (and, as @petermorwood remarks in passing, "would-be capo"), who's already busy genuflecting to the US government's incoming (mob-)boss's agenda.

So, as the man says,

"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly..."

[magpiedminx]

[magpiedminx]

I've been getting A LOT of the Palestine spam bots in my inbox lately .. and I know they're fake (for multitudes of reasons) but it STILL makes me feel guilty every single time I report and block. I'm such a sap. 😭