#Application Forms 2017

[tamamita]

how is isis different from hamas?

Gonna make it easy and comprehensible:

ISIS or DA'ISH is a transnational terror organization consisting of Iraqi Baathists, former Syrian rebels or moderates, recruited fighters from all over the world, former US captives in Iraq, and oppressed and disenfranchised Sunnis. Wahhabi in nature, ISIS subscribes to the literalist tradition of Islam, based on a strict adherence to Tawhid (Islamic monotheism), rejecting the concept of intercession and saint venerations, seeing them as an act of idolatry. Their religious verdicts are based on the literal interpretation of the Qur'an and Sunnah, rejecting metaphorical exegesis. They aim to establish a global caliphate, seeking to eliminate anyone who opposses it regardless of religious or ideological differences. They see their cause as a hastening of various Islamic end time prophecies in their interpretation of Islamic eschatology. Like many Salafis, they reject Taqlid, which is to conform to one of the four schools of thought in Sunni Islam. On top of that, they reject religious innovations (Bid'ah), which is the idea that anything introduced to the religion without any religious basis is heresy. Whether it be practical or theological, they deem any Muslim who engage in Bid'ah to be an apostate or heretic. They are notorious for their intolerance of non-Muslims and application of Takfirism (excommunication) on Muslims, whether Sunni or Shi'a. Christians had to pay the Jizya (poll tax) in their territories, while in other cases, they were murdered, expelled and had their churches destroyed or converted. They have no tolerance for Shi'a Muslims and will kill them on the spot (see: Speicher Massacre), and have often targeted them with IEDs or suicide bombers. Non-Muslims, like the Ezidis or Ahlul Haqq, were often subjected to execution whereas their women and children were either married away, converted or used as sex slaves. DAESH is not interested in national liberation, seeing it as a blasphemous innovation. DAESH does not consider Hamas to be Muslims due to struggle for national liberation which is supported by Iran and various Shi'i proxies.

Hamas is a political and military resistance group that consists of Palestinians. After the failures of the Oslo accord, Hamas broke away from PLO and formed their own political party. They either subscribe to the Shafi'i school of thought or some form of Ikhwani Salafism (Salafism as envisioned by the Muslim Brotherhood). They're a semi-governmental power in Gaza and are responsible for upholding the social and civil institutions, such as hospitals, schools and etc. Hamas' specific aim is localized and seeks to destroy the Zionist entity in order to form a one-state solution under an Islamic emirate or Islamic democracy. Their only enemy is Israel and any of its allies. As of the Hamas charter of 2017, they do not have an intolerance for non-Muslims or people of different religious and ideological comportments, as seen by them holding ties with both Shi'a and Socialist militias, such as Hezbollah and the PFLP/DFLP. Hamas is concerned with the national liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians. Being an entirely localized resistance group, they do not engage in global jihadism like ISIS nor do they carry out attacks internationally.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[zvaigzdelasas]

[H]undreds of legal experts and groups on Monday urged the global community—and the United States government in particular—"to comply with international law by ending the use of broad, unilateral coercive measures that extensively harm civilian populations."

In a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, the jurists and legal groups wrote that "75 years ago, in the aftermath of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history, nations of the world came together in Geneva, Switzerland to establish clear legal limits on the treatment of noncombatants in times of war."

"One key provision... is the prohibition of collective punishment, which is considered a war crime," the letter continues. "We consider the unilateral application of certain economic sanctions to constitute collective punishment."

Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild—one of the letter's signatories—said in a statement that "economic sanctions cause direct material harm not only to the people living on the receiving end of these policies, but to those who rely on trade and economic relations with sanctioned countries."

"The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare and hold the U.S. Government accountable for violating international law every time it wields these coercive measures," she added.[...]

"Hundreds of millions of people currently live under such broad U.S. economic sanctions in some form, including in notable cases such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela," the letter notes. "The evidence that these measures can cause severe, widespread civilian harm, including death, is overwhelming. Broad economic sanctions can spark and prolong economic crises, hinder access to essential goods like food, fuel, and medicine, and increase poverty, hunger, disease, and even death rates, especially among children. Such conditions in turn often drive mass migration, as in the recent cases of Cuba and Venezuela."

For more than 64 years, the U.S. has imposed a crippling economic embargo on Cuba that had adversely affected all sectors of the socialist island's economy and severely limited Cubans' access to basic necessities including food, fuel, and medicines. The Cuban government claims the blockade cost the country's economy nearly $5 billion in just one 11-month period in 2022-23 alone. For the past 32 years, United Nations member states have voted overwhelmingly against the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Last year's vote was 187-2, with the U.S. and Israel as the only dissenters.

According to a 2019 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., as many as 40,000 Venezuelans died from 2017-18 to U.S. sanctions, which have made it much more difficult for millions of people to obtain food, medicine, and other necessities.

"Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent," the new letter asserts. "A 1960 State Department memo on the embargo of Cuba suggested 'denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.'"

"Asked whether the Trump administration's sanctions on Iran were working as intended, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded that 'things are much worse for the Iranian people, and we're convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime,'" the signers added.

12 Aug 24

[fanauthorworkshop]

Applications now open!

The Fall 2024 Fanauthor Workshop is a 7-week writing course led by Betts (@bettsfic). The workshop lends a supportive space to writers who identify as fans to receive constructive feedback on fanfiction, original fiction, or creative nonfiction.

Art by @emimayooo 💖

Where & When

We meet weekly over Zoom. You can apply for one of two sessions:

Group A: Wednesdays from Oct. 9 - Nov. 20, 12-2pm EST

Group B: Mondays from Oct. 7 - Nov. 18, 6-8pm EST

What

FAW is a feedback-oriented workshop with the occasional generative session. This means that each week we read 2 pieces submitted by participants, offer written feedback, and discuss them over Zoom. You'll be able to sign up for the week you would like to workshop your own piece, which can be anything under 6k words.

There may be weeks where, in lieu of workshopping, I present external readings and writing exercises. These sessions will be dependent on the number of participants. For example, if we have 10 participants and 6 workshop weeks, that means one week will be devoted to a reading discussion and generative activity.

I developed a workshop model that focuses mostly on affirmations and positivity, as well as descriptive over prescriptive feedback, which is to say, describing one's experience of reading rather than prescribing solutions to perceived problems. We also present improvement-oriented feedback, but avoid negativity, judgment, and pedantry. Week 1 is spent going over the model and how to give feedback.

About FAW

The first FAW was held in 2017 as an independent study in my MFA. I restarted it in 2022 and since then have led 9 sessions with a total of over 50 participants, about half of whom have participated in the workshop more than once.

Participation in the workshop includes entrance into the FAW community, an active Discord server where we host:

Ongoing accountability meetings, where we chat over Zoom about our projects and set goals for ourselves every other week

A monthly longform writing workshop, where writers can workshop any story between 6k and 100k words

A short story club, where we read and chat about original short form works

Events and activities like movie nights and co-op gaming

Scheduled write-ins and impromptu writing sprints

We also chat about writing and craft, offer resources, and share many, many pet photos.

In addition, participants of the workshop receive:

A one-hour consultation with me to go over your workshop feedback, come up with a plan for revision and/or publication, or anything else you’d like to discuss regarding your writing

Open enrollment in future workshops

Priority sign-ups for WTFS (Write the Fucking Story), WIP Cleanout, and other one-off generative sessions

Eligibility

Anyone over the age of 18 who considers themselves a participant of fandom and who is familiar with fanfiction may apply. A stable internet connection is also required.

Cost

The cost of the workshop is "pay what you can" with the recommended amount of $300. To be as inclusive as possible, I don't want money to be a deterrent for anyone interested in participating.

Payment (or notification of nonpayment) will be requested prior to the start of workshop via PayPal, Venmo, or Wise. You can also pay in installments.

Application requirements

To apply, you will need:

An informal cover letter discussing your fan history and goals as a (fan)writer (more specific instructions on submittable)

A short sample of your writing, either original work or fanfiction. This may be previously published/posted

You can apply via submittable. Applications close September 15.

FAQ under the cut

FAQ

Are there any content restrictions to what I can workshop?

The only restriction is word count (max 6k), with the following caveats:

If you workshop a piece in a form other than prose (for example, a script), your peers may not be able to offer constructive feedback on that aspect of the work. Participants are asked only to have a familiarity with prose.

Content warnings are required for each piece (if applicable), and participants who are uncomfortable reading certain subject matter may abstain from your workshop.

What is the time commitment of the workshop?

As a participant of the workshop, you'll be asked to:

Workshop any piece of your own prose up to 6k words, which will need to be uploaded to the group folder one week before your workshop.

Read 2 pieces per week, write out your individual crit, and attend the workshop itself.

What is the timeline of the workshop?

In week 1, we go over the syllabus and do a writing exercise. Weeks 2 through 7 will be a workshop, a discussion of an external reading, or a writing activity. Prior to the start of workshop, you'll be able to sign up for the week you would like to workshop your piece.

Structure of the sessions:

Question of the day

First workshop

Short break

Second workshop

We'll go over my workshop model and the syllabus in week 1.

Do I have to participate in the Zoom meetings (camera and mic on)?

Attending the workshop itself is required, and everyone is asked to offer at least one note of positive feedback on each piece, so mics are necessary. Cameras are preferred but not required.

You can't asynchronously participate, i.e. read the pieces and offer written feedback without attending the sessions.

Can workshop participants submit to OFIC Magazine?

Yes! Part of the reason I run the workshop is to inspire and promote the original work of fanwriters. You can follow us on tumblr @oficmag.

Who is running the workshop?

@bettsfic! In short, I lived a dreary cubicle life as a banker until I found fanfiction at 24. I loved it so much that I quit my job to get an MFA in creative writing. I loved the MFA so much that I became a writing teacher. I have some publications, awards, an agent, and 2 million words of fic on ao3. I don't have a book out yet but I'm getting there.

Currently I'm a writing coach and freelance editor. I also have a lowkey writing-related newsletter. And I've been answering writing advice asks on my blog for 10 years.

If you want an idea of the kind of writing activities I create, last summer I worked with @books on a workshop series which includes craft essays and some fun prompts.

If you're interested in my original work, my short story "Not If, When" is a good representation of my writing. For something darker, check out "Shut Up and Kill Me."

What is the workshop like?

Check out G's experience of attending the workshop. And here's some feedback from previous participants.

One final note: I'm working on updating the copy about the workshop on my website and move it over to OFIC's website. This post and Submittable has the most updated information on the workshop. If you have questions about discrepancies (or anything at all), you can shoot me an ask, DM me, or add me on Discord (I'm bettsfic there too). Or you can email me at ekweeks@gmail.com.

[sigilmint]

Announcing The Light at the End, a Fan Zine dedicated to Arkane Austin, in celebration of their amazing works over the years!

A farewell zine for Arkane Austin, celebrating Dishonored (2012), Prey (2017), and Redfall (2023) and their respective DLCs. The Austin team has been making incredible games for so long, and they deserve to be honored. This zine will be digital only, and completely free.

Application form is here, along with the timeline for the project. Check it out, and please pass along to your friends 🐀🐋🛰️🌕🦇🩸

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“Many of the women in Heterodoxy moved in corresponding circles and maintained similar beliefs. They were “veterans of social reform efforts,” writes Scutts in Hotbed, and they belonged to “leagues, associations, societies and organizations of all stripes.” A large number were public figures—influential lawyers, journalists, playwrights or physicians, some of whom were the only women in their fields—and often had their names in the papers for the work they were performing. Many members were also involved in a wide variety of women’s rights issues, from promoting the use of birth control to advocating for immigrant mothers.

Heterodoxy met every other Saturday to discuss such issues and see how members might collaborate and cultivate networks of reform. Gatherings were considered a safe space for women to talk, exchange ideas and take action.”

In the early 20th century, New York City’s Greenwich Village earned a reputation as America’s bohemia, a neighborhood where everyone from artists and poets to activists and organizers came to pursue their dreams.

“In the Village, it was so easy to bump into great minds, to go from one restaurant to another, to a meeting house, to work for a meeting or to a gallery,” says Joanna Scutts, author of Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism. Here was a community where rents were still affordable, creative individuality thrived, urban diversity and radical experiments were the norm, and bohemian dissenters could come and go as they pleased.

Such a neighborhood was the ideal breeding ground for Heterodoxy, a secret society that paved the way for modern feminism. The female debating club’s name referred to the many unorthodox women among its members. These individuals “questioned forms of orthodoxy in culture, in politics, in philosophy—and in sexuality,” noted ThoughtCo. in 2017.

Born as part of the initial wave of modern feminism that emerged during the 19th and early 20th centuries with suffrage at its center, the radical ideologies debated at Heterodoxy gatherings extended well beyond the scope of a women’s right to vote. In fact, Heterodoxy had only one requirement for membership: that a woman “not be orthodox in her opinion.”

“The Heterodoxy club and the work that it did was very much interconnected with what was going on in the neighborhood,” says Andrew Berman, executive director of Village Preservation, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting and preserving the distinct heritage of Greenwich Village. “With the suffrage movement already beginning to crest, women had started considering how they could free themselves from the generations and generations of structures that had been placed upon them.”

Unitarian minister Marie Jenney Howe founded Heterodoxy in 1912, two years after she and her husband, progressive reformer Frederic C. Howe, moved to the Village. “Howe was already in her 40s,” says Scutts, “and just got to know people through her husband’s professional connections, and during meetings and networks where progressive groups were very active at the time.”

Howe’s mindset on feminism was clear: “We intend simply to be ourselves,” she once said, “not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves.”

Many of the women in Heterodoxy moved in corresponding circles and maintained similar beliefs. They were “veterans of social reform efforts,” writes Scutts in Hotbed, and they belonged to “leagues, associations, societies and organizations of all stripes.” A large number were public figures—influential lawyers, journalists, playwrights or physicians, some of whom were the only women in their fields—and often had their names in the papers for the work they were performing. Many members were also involved in a wide variety of women’s rights issues, from promoting the use of birth control to advocating for immigrant mothers.

Heterodoxy met every other Saturday to discuss such issues and see how members might collaborate and cultivate networks of reform. Gatherings were considered a safe space for women to talk, exchange ideas and take action. Jessica Campbell, a visual artist whose exhibition on Heterodoxy is currently on display at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, says, “Their meetings were taking place without any kind of recording or public record. It was this privacy that allowed the women to speak freely.”

Scutts adds, “The freedom to disagree was very important to them.”

With 25 charter members, Heterodoxy included individuals of diverse backgrounds, including lesbian and bisexual women, labor radicals and socialites, and artists and nurses. Meetings were often held in the basement of Polly’s, a MacDougal Street hangout established by anarchist Polly Holladay. Here, at what Berman calls a “sort of nexus for progressive, artistic, intellectual and political thought,” the women would gather at wooden tables to discuss issues like fair employment and fair wages, reproductive rights, and the antiwar movement. The meetings often went on for hours, with each typically revolving around a specific subject determined in advance.

Reflecting on these get-togethers later in life, memoirist Mabel Dodge Luhan described them as gatherings of “fine, daring, rather joyous and independent women, … women who did things and did them openly.”

Occasionally, Heterodoxy hosted guest speakers, like modern birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, who later became president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and anarchist Emma Goldman, known for championing everything from free love to the right of labor to organize.

While the topics discussed at each meeting remained confidential, many of Heterodoxy’s members were quite open about their involvement with the club. “Before I’d even heard of Heterodoxy,” says Scutts, “I had been working in the New-York Historical Society, researching for an [exhibition on] how radical politics had influenced a branch of the suffrage movement. That’s when I began noticing many of the same women’s names in overlapping causes. I then realized that they were all associated with this particular club.”

These women included labor lawyer, suffragist, socialist and journalist Crystal Eastman, who in 1920 co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union to defend the rights of all people nationwide, and playwright Susan Glaspell, a key player in the development of modern American theater.

Other notable alumni were feminist icon Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” illustrates the mental and physical struggles associated with postpartum depression, and feminist psychoanalyst Beatrice M. Hinkle, the first woman physician in the United States to hold a public health position. Lou Rogers, the suffrage cartoonist whose work was used as a basis for the design of Wonder Woman, was a member of Heterodoxy, as was Jewish socialist activist Rose Pastor Stokes.

Grace Nail Johnson, an advocate for civil rights and an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance, was Heterodoxy’s only Black member. Howe “had personally written to and invited her,” says Scutts, “as sort of a representation of her race. It’s an unusual case, because racial integration was quite uncommon at the time.”

While exceptions did exist, the majority of Heterodoxy’s members were middle class or wealthy, and the bulk of them had obtained undergraduate degrees—still very much a rarity for women in the early 20th century. Some even held graduate degrees in fields like medicine, law and the social sciences. These were women with the leisure time to participate in political causes, says Scutts, and who could afford to take risks, both literally and figuratively. But while political activism and the ability to discuss topics overtly were both part of Heterodoxy’s overall ethos, most of its members were decidedly left-leaning, and almost all were radical in their ideologies. “Even if the meetings promoted an openness to disagree,” says Scutts, “it wasn’t like these were women from across the political spectrum.”

Rather, they were women who inspired and spurred each other on. For example, about one-third of the club’s members were divorced—a process that was still “incredibly difficult, expensive and even scandalous” at the time, says Scutts. The club acted as somewhat of a support network for them, “just by the virtue of having people around you that are saying, ‘I’ve gone through the process. You can, too, and survive.’”

According to Campbell, Heterodoxy’s new inductees were often asked to share a story about their upbringing with the club’s other members. This approach “helped to break down barriers that might otherwise be there due to their ranging political views and professional allegiances,” the artist says.

The Heterodoxy club usually went on hiatus during the summer months, when members relocated to places like Provincetown, Massachusetts, a seasonal outpost for Greenwich Village residents. As the years progressed, meetings eventually moved to Tuesdays, and the club began changing shape, becoming less radical in tandem with the Village’s own shifting energy. Women secured the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, displacing the momentum that fueled the suffrage movement; around this same time, the Red Scare saw the arrests and deportations of unionists and immigrants. Rent prices in the neighborhood also increased dramatically, driving out the Village’s bohemian spirit. As the club’s core members continued aging, Heterodoxy became more about continuing friendships than debating radical ideologies.

“These women were not all young when they started to meet,” says Scutts in the “Lost Ladies of Lit” podcast. “You know, it’s 20, 30 years later, and so they stayed in touch, but they never really found the second generation or third generation to keep it going in a new form.”

By the early 1940s, the biweekly meetings of Heterodoxy were no more. Still, the club’s legacy lives on, even beyond the scope of modern feminism.

“These days, it’s so easy to dehumanize people when you’re only hearing one facet of their belief system,” says Campbell. “But the ability to change your mind and debate freely like the women of Heterodoxy, without any public record? It’s an interesting model for rethinking the way we talk about problems and interact with other people today.”

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Slag

A general term for the waste produced during smelting, slag mainly consists of oxides, though the exact composition depends on the metals and minerals being processed. Essentially, during smelting, two things are produced: the target metal/alloy, and its slag. It is typically classified into one of three categories: ferrous (containing iron/generated during iron or steel production); ferroalloy (generated during ferroalloy production); or non-ferrous (essentially, all other smelting processes). Slag is generally disposed of in a solid form in slag dumps, where they can potentially leach toxic or heavy metals into nearby soil and groundwater. The push to recycle slag, or find applications for it, has therefore been increasing in recent years.

Sources/Further Reading: (Images - Wikipedia) (ASMS) (USGS) (2021 book chapter) (2021 article) (2017 article)

[sanctus-ingenium]

answering asks and stuff vol 5

i think he'd just sort of hang there limply like a sack of potatoes. no verve in that man

(more asks under the cut because u know these things get long)

-

Yes! There are actually soooo many different horses around the place, it's the reason the ranger organisations in Inver have a section entirely dedicated to horsemanship. Your whole job can just be the guy they call whenever there's a horse (this is what Pascal's human sweetheart does btw)

The Unicorn is a creature who starts to make trouble in the year 2017 and is a nemesis of Pascal who, again, is a modern Inver character. I do portray Unicorn with water motifs on purpose, but that's because his territory or the area in which he operates is the great inland sea of Inver, Lough Cánamac.

(@sleepvines)

The water horse in that picture referred in the ask & those tags lived until the year 1864 in the victorian Inver period and died pretty dramatically after tangling with the Púca servants and a completely normal human man called Jean-Baptiste (Félix's twin brother). Jean-Baptiste was researching the application of bombarding enchanted objects with electrons in a vacuum tube to see what the hell it would do. He was sort of a scientist, if you consider making jerry-rigged electromagnets with no safety features in his bedroom 'science'. He discovered that the electrical current in a vacuum tube interacted with a magic object by piercing the barrier between the Overworld and the Otherworld, and this would often have flashy and explosive consequences. To date, he is the only human character of Inver who has invented his own form of magic without the aid of any faery patron or familiar.

The water horse, after its scuffle with Félix as depicted in the painting, withdrew and then came back for vengeance. And one CRITICAL feature of faeries in Inver is that they physically can not tell identical twins apart - no matter how different they look, those two people are one person in the mind of someone from the Otherworld. So it attacked Jean-Baptiste instead and died super hard because he doesn't fuck around.

-

So his head isn't fake fake like Nosewyse's is, there are actual skull fragments in there.

I can't comment on what causes the growth of flesh within holy beasts but I can say that this would not be a factor for either Pantera or Krokodilos. We'll just call it an imbalance of his humours ;)

-

Guinefort is suuuuper archaic, one of the very earliest Holy Beasts still kicking. And back then, they built small on purpose. They didn't have the technical knowhow or the foundation of knowledge to make anything much bigger or more complex. When he was built, he was the pinnacle of enginesmithing and he did hunt dragons, though back then he would have been accompanied not by companion beasts in a crusade, but by ground troops only. He was (and is) very quick on his feet thanks to his super light build and works well as a lure or decoy (his actual animal type is a greyhound).

He also used to have a series of regular black powder cannons mounted on his back, which was fun and dangerous and used to be absolute hell to maintain & reload because he couldn't carry much ammunition.

[coochiequeens]

Just the trans cult comparing their cosmetic procedures to people with real medical conditions.

By Amy Hamm June 29, 2024

A trans-identified male in British Columbia, Canada, is suing the provincial Ministry of Health after it refused to fund the out-of-country vaginoplasty he demanded be performed in Bangkok, Thailand.

The man, referred to only as KW in legal documents due to a publication ban on his name, originally lodged a complaint at the BC Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) in 2019 alleging discrimination. KW claimed that being denied funding for the out-of-country surgery was akin to sex-based discrimination on the basis of his transgender status.

In his legal complaint, KW insisted that a female would not have been denied the same laparoscopic sigmoid colon vaginoplasty — a procedure that is sometimes performed on females who are born with exceedingly rare disorders of sexual development. The surgery includes utilizing sections of harvested colon tissue to craft the appearance of a vulva and vagina.

KW claimed that he was unable to apply for the surgery because he could not find a specialist to complete his application form, and argued that a female could have accessed a gynecologist to do so.

The BC Ministry of Health (MOH) sought to dismiss KW’s claim on the basis that it held no reasonable chance of success, but was denied in a May 10, 2024 ruling. The matter will now be scheduled for a hearing.

The Ministry argued that they did not discriminate against KW, deny him medical care, or treat him differently “than any other beneficiary who requests out of country medical services.” They also noted that KW did not fully complete his application for surgery, adding that vaginoplasty procedures are available in Canada “and as such, the public health system was not obligated to fund the service [he] was seeking overseas.” 

The MOH gave approval for KW to undergo a fully-funded vaginoplasty at GrS Montreal in October of 2017. However, months later in January of 2018, KW applied to the MOH to instead fund his surgery in Bangkok, Thailand.

He was advised that the application had to be completed by a BC specialist, and not the plastic surgeon from Thailand.

A letter from the Ministry read: “When surgery is available in Canada, the attending specialist in BC may recommend surgery outside Canada. The specialist must include peer reviewed medical articles with the application to confirm surgery outside Canada will result in a significant difference in success. The recommendation for surgery is sincerely respected; however as surgery is available in Canada, provincial coverage was not approved for surgery in Thailand.”

Ultimately, KW never completed his application and accepted the vaginoplasty at GrS Montreal on January 6, 2020. The hospital performs penile inversion vaginoplasty, in which penile tissue is “flipped” to create a vagina-like canal. This is the most common vaginoplasty technique in North America.

BCHRT panel member, Shannon Beckett, wrote in her May decision that the tribunal is also going to consider discrimination on the basis of gender identity, though KW did not allege this in his filing. She argued that the Ministry of Health made a “problematic” statement when they refuted KW’s claim about females accessing this type of procedure. Beckett appears to have taken specific issue with the Ministry’s explanation that vaginoplasties are “rarely performed on cisgender women, and only in cases where it is medically necessary (i.e. due to disease or injury).”

Beckett wrote that the Ministry’s usage of the term “medically necessary “ has “implied that where transgender women are seeking the same surgery, it is not in cases ‘where it is medically necessary.’ This argument appears to be based on stereotypical and outdated ideas about the nature and reason for gender-affirming surgery. There is no indication in the context of this complaint that the gender-affirming care KW was seeking was not medically necessary.”

This argument is reminiscent of a 2019 procedural decision by BCHRT member Devyn Cousineau wherein she referred to notorious trans activist Jessica Yaniv having his male testicles waxed by unwilling women as “critical gender affirming care.”

The hearing dates for KW’s suit against the BCHRT have not been scheduled, and it will likely take months if not years as the BCHRT is facing an enormous backlog of almost 5,000 active files.

This case is not the first of its kind in Canada. Earlier this year, and as reported by Reduxx, an Ontario man successfully sued the Ontario Health Insurance Plan to have the province fund an experimental surgery in Texas that will leave him with his penis as well as a surgically created “neo-vagina.”

The man in this case broke his own publication ban when he posted about his diaper fetish on Reddit, and openly admitted he was the individual documented in the highly-publicized case. 

[nerdygaymormon]

Congratulations to Nepal!

Here's a brief history leading up to today.

Nepal has tried to stamp out social discrimination ever since a decade-long Maoist rebellion ended in 2006 and the 239-year-old Hindu monarchy was dismantled in 2008.

In 2007, Nepal repealed laws against gay sex and introduced several laws which protected "gender and sexual minorities". The Supreme Court ruled later that year for the government to create laws to protect LGBTI rights, and for the government to form a committee to look into legalizing same-sex marriage. Successive governments failed to change the law on same-sex marriage. 

A lesbian couple held a traditional Hindu marriage ceremony in 2011, but the marriage has no legal status in Nepal. More and more public parades and unofficial weddings started being held in Nepal.

A new constitution was adopted in 2015 which recognized LGBT rights as fundamental rights, and while it didn't specifically list same-sex marriage, it did list several other rights, such as being able to acquire a citizenship certificate according to one's gender identity.

In July 2017, Monica Shahi and Ramesh Nath, successfully registered their marriage. Shahi is a third gender person, with their sex recorded as "other" on their official identity documents. The Nepal Home Ministry said the marriage could be invalid.

In October 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the government was wrong to deny a Visa to the American wife of a Nepalese citizen. The government argued it rejected the application since Nepal doesn't recognize same-sex marriages. The Supreme Court ruled that the law is as long as they have a valid marriage license, a foreigner who is married to a Nepali citizen is eligible for the Visa, the rules do not specify that the foreign national must be either same or opposite gender. Furthermore, it pointed to the Nepal constitution that an LGBT citizen is entitled to live life with dignity without discrimination.

March 2023, the Supreme Court ordered the government to recognize the marriage of a Nepali citizen and his German husband and to issue a spousal visa. It also directed the government to draft legislation for full marriage equality in Nepal

In June of 2023, the Supreme Court ordered the government to make necessary arrangements to temporarily create a separate register for marriages of "sexual minorities and non-traditional couples" until lawmakers come up with a new legal framework to uphold such unions permanently.

Nov 29, 2023, a same-sex couple officially registered their marriage

[forgeline]

Not your grandpa’s Corvette. This amazing “RS63” 1963 Chevrolet Corvette was built by Roadster Shop and earned an Editors Choice award, at the 2017 SEMA Show. It’s powered by a 817HP 376ci Edelbrock-supercharged Wegner Motorsports LS3 mated to a 4L80E transmission and rides on a Roadster Shop FAST TRACK chassis, Baer brakes, 265/30ZR19 & 345/30ZR19 Michelin Pilot Super Sport tires, and 19x9/19x12 Forgeline forged three piece DE3C-SL wheels finished with Gloss Black centers & Gloss Black Outers! See more at: https://forgeline.com/customer-gallery/baer-brakes

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Forgeline formed in 1994 with the express purpose of manufacturing USA-made custom lightweight forged wheels for road racing applications. For 30 years since, we've built our reputation by engineering and manufacturing wheels that can withstand the extreme demands of sports car racing. With an unwavering commitment to strength, safety, and performance, we've earned our place on some of the world’s fastest track cars, including the factory-engineered Chevrolet C8 Corvette GT3.R, Chevrolet Camaro GT4.R, Ford Mustang GT4, and Hennessey Venom F5 Revolution. We continue to manufacture our forged wheels in Dayton, Ohio using exclusively U.S.-sourced parts, including our industry-leading APP aluminum forgings that meet the most stringent aerospace and defense industry specifications. Don't settle for anything less.

[mlcalendarproject]

ML Calendar Project Master Post

Welcome to the Miraculous Ladybug Calendar Project, made by fans for fans.

What is the Miraculous Calendar Project?

It’s a zine-style project where multiple artists collaborate to create a calendar with a Miraculous theme to give back to the fandom! Currently we are digital only, the free download will be available on December 1, 2023.

It was created by @thelastpilot in 2017 and has been dormant since 2019 — but now with new management we are happy to bring this back to the community.

The calendar will be comprised of a collection of fanart as well as the traditional 12 month calendar complete with National French Holidays, important dates for the ML fandom, as well as other possible significant dates based on what the community decided to come up with! 

Contributor apps can be found here!

How can I apply?

Our contributor applications open June 15, 2023. We will share a link to the form here as well as it's own dedicated post.

Who can apply?

Anyone! The only requirement is that you are a fan of the show. Previous zine experience is not necessary, though we will ask to see your art portfolio.

How can we know when to expect updates?

Our schedule is posted here, as well as listed in our carrd and linked on our page.

Any other questions can be sent to our inbox!

Thank you so much for reading, we look forward to sharing the 2024 calendar with you!

[kienansidhe]

hi, im kienan! im the current host of the disaster hearts system. we are a korean american body with dissociative identity disorder and have had multiple diff hosts over the course of this blogs run. i or some variation of me have been host since around 2017-18ish. for transparencys sake, the body is 25+. do not ask abt age specifics please.

we are a survivor of csa trauma, parental abuse, religious and cult abuse, and generally very traumatized, and our experience of life is irrevocably colored by that lens.

we are disabled and unable to hold a job ever since we got long covid in april of 2020. we are fully dependent on our partners, working on our disability application, and still coming to terms with the reality of being probably permanently disabled.

unless otherwise specified it is probably some variation of kienan speaking.

-♡♡♡-

i, kienan, am queer and i prefer to be addressed by strangers with he/they/it or fae/faeself pronouns. i dont rlly care which of those you use, tho, no need to rotate or anything.

some other labels that generally describe me: nonbinary, transmasc, gnc, cuntboy, [redacted], [redacted], femme, femboy, genderweird, bi, aro/ace with a couple exceptions, sex favorable, kink obligate, freak, degenerate, pervert.

i currently have 4 partners, referred to here as prettyboyfriend, nesting boyfriend, girlfriend/daddy, and moirail.

no dni, i think theyre stupid and the only ppl i would not want to interact would not respect dnis anyways lmao. if i have a problem with you i will just say so or block you or whatever.

some of my beliefs and what to expect on this blog are under the cut.

i believe in rehabilitation and compassion, full stop. yes, even for those people. i think that othering and dehumanizing others sucks, that thoughts do not define you (yes, even those thoughts), and that the only thing that matters is your actions.

i think callouts are never helpful, ever. ive literally never seen one do anything helpful or good.

i try my best to interact with others in good faith, and i expect the same in return.

we were homeschooled in a cult and our education was heavily ~moderated~ to keep us brainwashed, and every time i think ive rooted out all the misinfo new stuff comes up. please be patient with me if i ask stupid questions, i literally am stupid. i have so much literal actual brain damage. i will do my best to be open minded, i rlly want to learn!

i believe that the best ways to combat csa are better sex education, breaking down the sanctity of the nuclear family, youth liberation (more legal rights and self advocacy for children), and not clogging child abuse report portals with fucking fictional art, jesus h christ.

medicalization of identities sucks. sysmeds, transmeds, im sorry youre miserable but thats not an excuse for trying to make everyone else miserable with you.

labels are only useful insofar as they help you connect with others like you and form solidarity in order to combat systemic oppression. if labels make you angry or miserable, consider not taking them so seriously.

its okay to just dislike ppl. its not always that deep. trying to come up with moral reasons to justify disliking ppl is rlly fucking catholic.

dont talk to me abt christianity. im aware that my trauma affects my ability to be compassionate in this area, so im staying in my lane. in fact probably dont talk to me abt religion in general.

im not a proshipper or an anti i touch grass <3, HOWEVER:

antishipping / purity politics / anti-kink / whatever you wanna call it, ppl equating fictional depictions of Obvious Bad Things with condoning, supporting, or normalizing them in real life are fucking stupid and have done unbelievable amounts of damage that has now reached far beyond fandom and kink circles. get a life, for fucks sake.

ppl who call themselves proshippers and then go around harassing antis are fucking stupid and have lost the original spirit of the term proship / anti-anti, which hinged around not harassing or harming others over fiction. get a life, for fucks sake.

just be kind. dont be a dick. treat others how you wanna be treated. we are all traumatized but thats not an excuse to be cruel. leave the world better than you found it.

youre gonna make mistakes. you just are. youre not perfect and also the world is complex. remember that you cant help everyone. try your best but dont lose yourself in the process.

art is everything. the act of creation is holy. more progress is made by creating -- building communities, making art, growing plants, building houses, building relationships -- than by tearing things down. there is probably a time and place for violence, destroying oppressive systems, bombing weapons factories, but if we arent creating a positive, healthy society alongside the destruction we are just leaving fertile ground for new oppressive structures to take root. create. create. create.

-♡♡♡-

many hosts has left a chaotic mess of tags on this blog but here are some we use pretty consistently:

#headspace: original posts. diary rambling, random thoughts, actual semi coherent opinions, anything

#my face: the body

#humans are good actually: reminders

#recovery things: mental health help

#important: there is so much stuff in this tag

#bookmark: too much here too lol

#feel better: just fluffy stuff

#vine: general funny video tag

#about, #me kin id, #i ghostwrote this post: stuff we relate to rlly hard + uquiz tags lol

#posts that are funnier when plural

[the-gateway-to-madness]

So anyway Ducktales 2017 is super fun for me because I'm literally exactly like Louie except I have a deep-rooted fear of becoming him because I live in reality and not a mansion-

There's satisfaction for him in finding loopholes, putting together the pieces in various situations, and being the strategist, but at the same time he can't think too much about the future or he'll stress out (given the fact the creators of the show confirmed Louie is like this because he grew up poor and took on a lot of that pressure emotionally, I assume that's part of why he doesn't plan for his future, but anyway-).

For him, that means coming up with strategies and tactics in the moment, on adventures. For me, that means finding ways to carefully integrate fictional characters and OCs into established worlds, analyzing things and picking them apart. Either way, we're not planning ahead all that far, both trying to escape reality.

And he's smart. Like, REALLY smart. But he's insecure about it because he's not book-smart in a family that really values book-smart. His family never really makes him feel bad for not being their kind of smart, just for the actions that stem as a result of it (his schemes, for example). You can tell they don't understand how he thinks, except Della (i, too, have a parent who gets me and a parent who does Not), and he has a lot of emotionally vulnerable moments with her because of that.

He only lets down his guard and genuinely connects with people he really feels get him, even though he's very eloquent and perfectly capable of casual connections with almost anyone. Same. I'm deeply, almost self-damagingly empathetic- my emotional attachments are a point of great vulnerability for me. I've chosen to embrace that vulnerability and the closeness and care it can bring me, but that's not a very natural choice for Louie like it is for me.

A lot of society only really seems to value "math-smarts", like what Huey has- more rigid intelligence, strong memorization of facts and figures, and being adept with numbers if you're lucky. But Louie has "language-smarts". Flexible, adaptable to different situations, but wow you don't come off as smart most of the time when you're this kind of smart. I was reading at a 12th grade level in 3rd grade- I know for a fact I grasp the English language at an abnormal level. But that intelligence really isn't applicable in a lot of situations, and I 100% recognize the form of lacking-self-esteem that comes with it- the form Louie shows consistently in season 2. For him, his linguistic, flexible, imaginative intelligence comes out as strategizing, lying, and scheming. For me, it comes out as quick, easy storytelling/writing with friends.

We share an ability to see patterns others don't while missing the patterns others do see.

Our kind of intelligence comes with this- very basic level of practicality. I hate sports because they seem unnecessary, over-hyped. I don't want to do a lot of very societally normal things because they seem convoluted and not necessary for happiness. I engage with television and movies because I find the construction of story and characters fascinating.

It all makes me feel like I'm lazy or can't ever do enough because I just... don't have an interest in a lot of things that people think one should. It's like- there's this level of intrinsic, constant self-awareness and practicality in me, to the point where I feel incapable of engaging with anything that doesn't interest me.

Combine that mentality with the burnout and emotional strain of being under severe financial pressure your entire life and, more specifically, not being able to do anything about it or get out of it- so why try to do anything at all? -, and bam, you get Louie Duck. He's motivated by money because to him money = comfort, and comfort = safety.

I also started consciously knowing what it'd be like and feel like when my childhood ended at something like- age 15 or 16. I was desperate to cling to the freedom, the lack of responsibility, the privilege of a safety net- for years. I see some of that in Louie too.

Oh, and of course Bobby Moynihan sold it. Really just went all in on giving Louie depth and feeling, 10/10 incredible performance-

Point is, it's cool to see someone who thinks like me actually portrayed pretty accurately onscreen. Thanks @suspendersofdisbelief :)

[fanimecastle]

Welcome to the third wave of Fanime Castle's character recruitment! 🏰

The game is going to be a small, story-focused retro role-playing game (PC only) heavily inspired by Fanime Quest, which was also another fanime game published in 2017. Your character can appear in-game as a potentially recruitable side character! How cool is that?

Keep reading this post for the rules.

Rules, Notes & Permissions

Same as last time, the character you submit through the form listed below must be yours in ownership. If you'd like to enter a character made by a different creator, permission is required (+ screenshot as proof when asked for).

The main story has been set in stone, and we're only looking for cameos. Please don't request any of your characters to become central to the plot!

Only send us 3 characters at maximum. The people who can edit this form have the right to delete your newer entries if you spam more than that!

Your character must have appeared in at least 1 published preview of a fanime episode. Works in progress are also acceptable, but do have sufficient proof on hand that you are currently working on said project (scripts, final character designs, storyboards, etc. are good enough).

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Applications close at March 1st, 2024 (EST). We will choose over 10 entries.

(Note: Anyone who has sent a character in previous waves may submit new OCs again! This is exclusive to the third wave.)

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[gen-x-catmom]

I'm in my late 40s, AFAB, and I came out as non-binary 5 years ago. I didn't understood why I didn't identify with womanhood in the slightest in my teens, 20s, and 30s. I tried extremely hard to pass, and I didn't do the worst job (I look pretty feminine, I'm short, and I'm high pitched.) I also grew up in Oklahoma, and remained there for much of my life. (I lived in Nashville, TN for about 18 months as a kid, and spent several months in Michigan in the late aughts.) Oklahoma is definitely not the safest place to be queer, let alone to be loudly and proudly queer.

I'd had quite a few gay/lesbians friends over the years - some were out and proud early on; others came out later down the line. More than one of them told me that they liked me in particular, because they felt safe being themselves around me. (That might've been a clue that I was queer.)

It took getting to know young Gen Z'ers on the Internet to even begin to have a clue about my own gender identity. I considered myself a staunch queer ally. Any time someone I knew came out as gay/trans/any form of queer, I was so happy for them, and did everything I could think of to be supportive. I guess that should've been another big-ass clue.

Tumblr, ironically, provided me with the bulk of my preliminary education on queerness. I didn't even realize non-binary was a thing until 2017. I just figured that I was born female, and that was that. I was just gonna continue failing at womanhood. I stumbled on content explaining various queer identities- both familiar and not.

It took a couple of years for my egg to crack, probably because I had so much going on in my life between 2017-2019. I had a serious mental health incident in 2017 that took a while to bounce back from. I was my grandpa's caretaker for years, and it got pretty heavy with his cancer diagnosis in 2018. After he died in early 2019, I was alone. I had time to think about myself- what to do next. I finally returned to Tumblr to distract myself from my grief and depression. I wish I could say what it was, specifically, that made me ask myself if maybe I was non-binary. I initially identified as genderfluid. While I don't think it's not applicable, I feel more comfortable with identifying as genderqueer and/or non-binary. Weirdly enough, I don't identify as male, but I identify more with aspects of masculinity than femininity. (Don't get me wrong, I'm AMAZING at performative femininity but it's more like drag to me.)

I'm deeply grateful for the younger generations, and their understanding of queerness. Y'all have done a better job of educating me on queerness than my fellow Gen X'ers have. It's ironic, and a bit sad, that Tumblr is shaping up to be transphobic too, because it's been the safest space for me to explore my identity.

BTW, I got out of Oklahoma last year. I live in Rhode Island now, and I'm much happier here. I feel safer being open about who I am. Also, summers here are far less intense.