#Instagram Profits System

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

HOW CHRISTIANITY SUPPORTS MULTIRACIAL, MULTICULTURAL DEMOCRACY

'The Bible doesn't mention abortion or gay marriage, but it goes on and on about forgiving debt, liberating the poor, and healing the sick' — This pastor perfectly explained how the values expressed in Christianity can support a multiracial, multicultural democracy instead of right-wing extremism (via jamestalarico on TikTok)

#christianity #religion #democracy

[intellibooks]

Unlock Your Restaurant's Full Potential with IntelliBooks

In the bustling world of restaurants, managing daily operations efficiently while delivering exceptional customer experiences is crucial. IntelliBooks, a cutting-edge restaurant management software solution, is designed to streamline your processes, improve efficiency, and elevate your restaurant’s performance. This blog explores how IntelliBooks can transform your restaurant operations, from point of sale systems and online ordering to inventory control and customer engagement.

Comprehensive Restaurant Management with IntelliBooks

Running a successful restaurant involves handling multiple tasks simultaneously. IntelliBooks simplifies these tasks by integrating all aspects of restaurant management into a single, user-friendly platform. This all-in-one solution covers everything from POS systems and mobile ordering to kitchen management and takeaway services, ensuring seamless operations and improved efficiency.

1. Point of Sale (POS) Systems:

At the core of IntelliBooks is its robust Point of Sale (POS) system, designed to handle everything from order processing and payments to sales tracking. This system ensures quick and accurate transactions, reducing wait times and enhancing customer satisfaction. Real-time sales tracking provides valuable insights into your restaurant’s performance, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to optimize your menu, staffing, and inventory.

For dynamic setups like food trucks or outdoor cafes, IntelliBooks offers a mobile POS system. This feature allows staff to take orders and process payments from anywhere, improving flexibility and customer service. The mobile POS system syncs seamlessly with the main POS and inventory systems, ensuring real-time updates and accuracy.

2. Online Ordering:

In today's digital age, offering online ordering is essential for any restaurant. IntelliBooks integrates seamlessly with your existing operations to manage online orders for delivery and pickup. Customers can place orders through your website or app, customize their meals, and pay online, providing convenience and boosting sales. This system reduces errors associated with manual order taking, ensuring accuracy and efficiency.

3. Inventory Management with IntelliScan:

Efficient inventory management is critical to a restaurant’s success. IntelliBooks' IntelliScan feature uses scanning technology to quickly update inventory levels, track usage, and manage stock efficiently. This feature reduces errors and optimizes supply chain management, ensuring that you never run out of essential ingredients.

IntelliScan improves coordination with suppliers by tracking stock levels and reorder points. This ensures timely reorders and prevents stockouts, which can disrupt service and affect customer satisfaction. Efficient inventory control leads to cost savings and better operational planning, helping you manage your restaurant more effectively.

4. Enhancing Customer Experience:

An organized kitchen is key to a restaurant's success. IntelliBooks’ kitchen order management system ensures smooth communication and workflow. Digital orders are clearly displayed for kitchen staff, reducing misunderstandings and errors. This system helps prioritize orders to ensure timely preparation and delivery, keeping the kitchen running efficiently. Additionally, it synchronizes with the POS and inventory systems to track ingredient usage and manage stock levels effectively.

For restaurants offering takeaway services, IntelliBooks provides a comprehensive solution to manage orders and ensure customer satisfaction. The system efficiently handles takeaway orders alongside dine-in and delivery services, keeping customers informed about the status of their orders with automated notifications. It allows customers to schedule their pickups, reducing wait times and enhancing convenience. This organized approach ensures a smooth takeaway experience for both customers and staff.

5. Customer Engagement and Loyalty Programs:

In the competitive restaurant industry, building strong customer relationships is essential. IntelliBooks offers tools to enhance customer engagement, including personalized service, loyalty programs, and targeted promotions. By understanding customer preferences and behaviors, you can tailor your offerings and marketing efforts to improve customer satisfaction and retention.

Real-Time Analytics and Insights

IntelliBooks provides powerful analytics tools that offer detailed insights into various aspects of your restaurant’s performance. These analytics help identify sales trends, best-selling items, and peak sales times, allowing you to optimize menu offerings and staffing. By analyzing customer data, you can understand preferences and tailor marketing efforts, enhancing customer engagement. The analytics also monitor operational efficiencies, helping you reduce costs and boost profitability. With IntelliBooks, you gain a comprehensive understanding of your business, empowering you to make informed decisions that drive success.

The platform generates detailed reports on sales, inventory, and employee performance. These reports can be customized to focus on specific areas of interest, providing you with the information you need to make strategic decisions. For instance, you can identify which menu items are most popular and adjust your offerings accordingly. You can also monitor employee performance to ensure that your staff is meeting expectations and contributing to the restaurant’s success.

Benefits for All Stakeholders

IntelliBooks is designed to offer benefits to all stakeholders within the restaurant ecosystem, ensuring a seamless and profitable dining experience. 

1. For Restaurant Owners:

Restaurant owners can leverage IntelliBooks to gain comprehensive control over their operations, enhancing efficiency and profitability. The platform integrates all aspects of restaurant management into one, making it easier to use. Detailed analytics allow owners to make informed business decisions and optimize performance. Improved inventory management and reduced waste result in significant cost savings.

2. For Staff:

Staff members benefit from IntelliBooks' user-friendly interfaces and efficient workflow management tools. Simplified interfaces make it easy for staff to learn and use the system effectively. Seamless integration between the front of house and kitchen ensures clear communication and order accuracy, enhancing productivity and allowing staff to focus on providing excellent customer service.

3. For Franchisees:

Franchisees can maintain consistency and streamline operations across multiple locations with IntelliBookss. The platform ensures uniformity in operations and customer experience across all franchise locations. It is scalable, allowing franchisees to manage multiple locations from a centralized platform. Performance metrics for each location can be tracked to identify areas for improvement.

4. For Customers:

Customers enjoy a superior dining experience with the convenience and efficiency provided by IntelliBooks. Faster order processing and reduced wait times enhance the overall dining experience. Customers can easily customize their orders, ensuring satisfaction. IntelliBooks provides a seamless experience from online ordering to takeaway, ensuring smooth and convenient service.

Why Choose IntelliBooks?

IntelliBooks stands out in the restaurant management software market for several reasons. It offers a comprehensive solution that covers all aspects of restaurant management, from POS systems to inventory control, ensuring that all operational needs are met within a single platform. The intuitive design of IntelliBooks makes it easy for staff to learn and use, reducing training time and enhancing productivity. Powerful analytics tools provide valuable insights into sales trends, customer preferences, and operational efficiencies, enabling informed business decisions. Seamless integration with other systems and tools ensures that all aspects of your restaurant’s operations are connected, enhancing workflow efficiency and reducing the risk of errors.

IntelliBooks is also scalable, supporting the management of multiple locations from a centralized dashboard, ensuring consistency and control across your entire operation. Robust customer support helps you get the most out of the platform, from onboarding and training to ongoing assistance, ensuring your success.

Conclusion

In the competitive restaurant industry, efficiency and customer satisfaction are key to success. IntelliBooks provides a comprehensive, user-friendly solution that integrates all aspects of restaurant management into one powerful platform. With features designed to streamline operations, enhance customer engagement, and provide valuable insights, IntelliBooks empowers restaurants to thrive in today’s market. Whether you run a dine-in restaurant, a quick-service outlet, a cloud kitchen, or any other type of dining establishment, IntelliBooks has the tools to help you succeed. Visit us at intellibooks.io and take the first step toward a more efficient and profitable restaurant.

Read More at IntelliBooks.io

LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/company/intellibooks/

Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/intellibooks?mibextid=LQQJ4d

Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/intelli_books/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D

Pinterest- https://in.pinterest.com/IntelliBooks/

Medium- https://medium.com/@intelligentblock2018

#RestaurantManagement #POSSystems #FoodServiceTech #CustomerSatisfaction #RestaurantSuccess #EfficiencyBoost #TechInRestaurants #HospitalityTech

[drdemonprince]

So that was the DNC. The young liberals, white feminists, and leftists-in-name only have gladly fallen in line behind Kamala Harris, because she makes them feel good, and because all they have wanted was to find sufficient reason to stop feeling bad and get back to brunch. They've abandoned Palestine, the same way they abandoned the immunocompromised and abolition of the police, because these and so many other left political movements were little more than fashion to them. They were never interested in seeing the destruction of a political system that many of them could, theoretically, make themselves comfortable inside. They just wanted to be seen as current and good.

Did you know that there are 24 million millionaires in the United States? 24 Million. Millionaires. 24,000,000 millionaires. Up from 22 million in 2022. That's about 7.2% of the population. So much for "we are the 99%." There is a sizeable segment of this population that benefits from economic inequality and imperialism, increasingly so, as both the size of the lower class and the upper class expand.

Many millions of additional people have no interest in changing the U.S. political paradigm, because they have been propagandized to believe all compassion and competence fall away under "anarchy," or because they lack community in any meaningful sense and have no conception of how to act collectively. This is not their fault, but it means they act in ways counter to leftist organizing: calling the cops on people, refusing to show up for others, hoarding what property and wealth they do have, demanding that all acts of resistance be peaceful and brief, and pouring all of the political energies into exhorting others to vote (no matter how dyed blue or gerrymander red their districts are, no matter how genocidal, transphobic, and xenophobic all the options might be).

People think that participating in community is buying a $355 Chappel Roan ticket. The big voices for leftist organizing, supposedly, are individuals who market themselves as such on Instagram and TikTok in order to sell books, tarot decks, subscriptions, and workshops.

The sole method for social or political engagement that most people know of is making posts online, on an overblown advertising platform, and then complaining that they did not receive enough attention on their (monetized) posts. A person with shrewd social media instincts and a strong writerly voice can fake an entire political identity, professional connections, and expertise, and be followed by tens of thousands while doing nothing constructive in their day to day life or even being the person they claim to be. The more actively they post and generate revenue for Meta, the more lucrative their grift becomes for themselves and the more social power they accrue. Chasing power and profit for oneself is definitionally counter to leftist ideals. Even if they do not believe in electoralism, people like this produce endless content about the subject, because people follow it like it's sports. They're glorified entertainers, selling politically themed content, never taking themselves off the stage.

Challenge any of this and people will lash out at you, because you've attacked their cloth mother, and they're very lonely and afraid. The corporately-moderated semblance of connection is nearly all they ever get. You can't talk about sex, drugs, death, or any difficult human realities. If you don't present a disneyfied version of yourself you get accused or being a degenerate predator. If you don't participate at all, you must be apathetic, which is very bad, because having the wrong emotions or thoughts makes you evil.

The protests at the DNC were all either ill-conceived PSL honey traps leading dozens of 19-year-olds into arrest via Signal chat, or bloated 3-hour fundraising attempts miles away from the United Center and corralled by the police and Department of Justice marshalls and their collaborators. Everybody else is far away, enjoying brat colored cocktails and picking out demure tradwife clothing to disappear into for the fall. Dreaming of not having to worry anymore is akin to longing for death, and many liberal Americans have gladly embraced total obliteration.

It's not just conservatism that is a death cult. It's also the preservation of the nation-state. State-making obliterates whole cultures, languages, lands, traditions, and unique, person-to-person modes of relating. You get your food from a corporation or a government bureaucracy that does not know you and makes you fight for it, never from a person. This makes you forget that it's just persons, like the ones you know, like yourself, who do everything. It makes you cling to the state, and to normalcy, rather than speaking openly and messily to anybody else.

This is where it all begins and ends. The hope of a revolution rising up to somehow liberate Palestine was always a fantasy, the stuff of kid's movies. The truth is much darker, but more bearable, because it's real. We are very far from a dramatic political change. Most people aren't willing to even let a stranger into their homes to keep them sheltered. Did we really think they were going to rise up and put their body on the line to fight the state? Give up Starbucks and their PPO? Break the law? Lower their property value? Of course not. Get real.

And so, where do we start? By moving far, far away from the individualistic, capitalistic, clout-based avenues of political "participation" that do nothing but benefit people who present themselves as influential voices. By doing the small, slow, humble work of actual community building. Talking to your neighbors, feeding people, housing people, sacrificing something for others, driving a senior to the doctor, building a way outside of your own head.

We have to become more reliant upon one another and less moved by big personalities who will never know us or give a damn about us as people. Instagram pays me the more of you look at my posts and share them on their app. It pays every other high follower account you take political guidance from, too. You should be suspicious of me. And all the rest of them. You should place more trust in your friends, your neighbors, and the power of your own mind.

The way out of all this will not be easy. And it will not happen on here.

[inthisuproar]

Was going to write this as a reply to something but realized it needed its own post.

The tl;dr is that, from the looks of it, Automattic absolutely has every intention of turning Tumblr into a marketing media platform.

I work for a marketing company. I build websites.

Specifically, I build websites on Wordpress.org, which is operated by the Wordpress Foundation.

The Wordpress Foundation is the non-profit counterpart to the for-profit company Automattic.

Automattic, as we know, is the company that currently owns Tumblr.

Now, the thing about Wordpress.org (not to be confused with Wordpress.com) is that it's very, VERY popular amongst small businesses. Not only can you build a fully-customizable website with relative ease, you can also add an online shop using another Automattic product: Woocommerce.

Not too long ago, I noticed a new feature was added to Woocommerce: A button next to each Woocommerce product which allows you to Blaze them to Tumblr right from the comfort of your dashboard:

This is what I get when I click that little "Blaze" button...

As someone who understands these tools, I understand the potential implications of these features:

The Blaze feature is basically an up-and-coming ad campaign system that's directly integrated with Woocommerce websites, which I think is the first ad marketing system of its kind. You don't have to log into a social media account to advertise your products, use a second-party integration, or even pay another service to manage your social media ads. It's all baked right into your business's website.

THIS is their planned money-maker, folks, not the rainbow checkmarks or crab armies. And the reason why Automattic would do this kind of thing is simple: Businesses are wealthier than individuals. By implementing a B2B service, Automattic can make more money off of Tumblr than user subscriptions and shoelaces will ever provide.

It's all the same song and dance. Businesses can now shove more ads into your face in a new, convenient fashion. It'll be ads that don't look like ads disguised amongst ads that do look like ads, just like it is with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and literally every other marketing media service that calls itself a "social" media.

(Tumblr's new video feature? My guess is that it's there to prepare for video-format Blaze campaigns. Influencer-style videos are the only kind of ad format Gen-Z is receptive to, which is why you're suddenly seeing videos on every platform.)

All they really gotta do now is make Tumblr look appealing to the normies so they can draw in a userbase that isn't trying to escape the onslaught of commercialism that plagues other sites.

Tumblr is one of the last true social medias we have; a place where content is made purely for the sake of talking about it. But given the writing on the wall...I doubt it'll stay that way.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Better failure for social media

Content moderation is fundamentally about making social media work better, but there are two other considerations that determine how social media fails: end-to-end (E2E), and freedom of exit. These are much neglected, and that’s a pity, because how a system fails is every bit as important as how it works.

Of course, commercial social media sites don’t want to be good, they want to be profitable. The unique dynamics of social media allow the companies to uncouple quality from profit, and more’s the pity.

Social media grows thanks to network effects — you join Twitter to hang out with the people who are there, and then other people join to hang out with you. The more users Twitter accumulates, the more users it can accumulate. But social media sites stay big thanks to high switching costs: the more you have to give up to leave a social media site, the harder it is to go:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Nature bequeaths some in-built switching costs on social media, primarily the coordination problem of reaching consensus on where you and the people in your community should go next. The more friends you share a social media platform with, the higher these costs are. If you’ve ever tried to get ten friends to agree on where to go for dinner, you know how this works. Now imagine trying to get all your friends to agree on where to go for dinner, for the rest of their lives!

But these costs aren’t insurmountable. Network effects, after all, are a double-edged sword. Some users are above-average draws for others, and if a critical mass of these important nodes in the network map depart for a new service — like, say, Mastodon — that service becomes the presumptive successor to the existing giants.

When that happens — when Mastodon becomes “the place we’ll all go when Twitter finally becomes unbearable” — the downsides of network effects kick in and the double-edged sword begins to carve away at a service’s user-base. It’s one thing to argue about which restaurant we should go to tonight, it’s another to ask whether we should join our friends at the new restaurant where they’re already eating.

Social media sites who want to keep their users’ business walk a fine line: they can simply treat those users well, showing them the things they ask to see, not spying on them, paying to police their service to reduce harassment, etc. But these are costly choices: if you show users the things they ask to see, you can’t charge businesses to show them things they don’t want to see. If you don’t spy on users, you can’t sell targeting services to people who want to force them to look at things they’re uninterested in. Every moderator you pay to reduce harassment draws a salary at the expense of your shareholders, and every catastrophe that moderator prevents is a catastrophe you can’t turn into monetizable attention as gawking users flock to it.

So social media sites are always trying to optimize their mistreatment of users, mistreating them (and thus profiting from them) right up to the point where they are ready to switch, but without actually pushing them over the edge.

One way to keep dissatisfied users from leaving is by extracting a penalty from them for their disloyalty. You can lock in their data, their social relationships, or, if they’re “creators” (and disproportionately likely to be key network nodes whose defection to a rival triggers mass departures from their fans), you can take their audiences hostage.

The dominant social media firms all practice a low-grade, tacit form of hostage-taking. Facebook downranks content that links to other sites on the internet. Instagram prohibits links in posts, limiting creators to “Links in bio.” Tiktok doesn’t even allow links. All of this serves as a brake on high-follower users who seek to migrate their audiences to better platforms.

But these strategies are unstable. When a platform becomes worse for users (say, because it mandates nonconsensual surveillance and ramps up advertising), they may actively seek out other places on which to follow each other, and the creators they enjoy. When a rival platform emerges as the presumptive successor to an incumbent, users no longer face the friction of knowing which rival they should resettle to.

When platforms’ enshittification strategies overshoot this way, users flee in droves, and then it’s time for the desperate platform managers to abandon the pretense of providing a public square. Yesterday, Elon Musk’s Twitter rolled out a policy prohibiting users from posting links to rival platforms:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221218173806/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy

This policy was explicitly aimed at preventing users from telling each other where they could be found after they leave Twitter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221219015355/https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1604531261791522817

This, in turn, was a response to many users posting regular messages explaining why they were leaving Twitter and how they could be found on other platforms. In particular, Twitter management was concerned with departures by high-follower users like Taylor Lorenz, who was retroactively punished for violating the policy, though it didn’t exist when she violated it:

https://deadline.com/2022/12/washington-post-journalist-taylor-lorenz-suspended-twitter-1235202034/

As Elon Musk wrote last spring: “The acid test for two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!”

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176

This isn’t particularly insightful. It’s obvious that any system that requires high walls and punishments to stay in business isn’t serving its users, whose presence is attributable to coercion, not fulfillment. Of course, the people who operate these systems have all manner of rationalizations for them.

The Berlin Wall, we were told, wasn’t there to keep East Germans in — rather, it was there to keep the teeming hordes clamoring to live in the workers’ paradise out. In the same way, platforms will claim that they’re not blocking outlinks or sideloading because they want to prevent users from defecting to a competitor, but rather, to protect those users from external threats.

This rationalization quickly wears thin, and then new ones step in. For example, you might claim that telling your friends that you’re leaving and asking them to meet you elsewhere is like “giv[ing] a talk for a corporation [and] promot[ing] other corporations”:

https://mobile.twitter.com/mayemusk/status/1604550452447690752

Or you might claim that it’s like “running Wendy’s ads [on] McDonalds property,” rather than turning to your friends and saying, “The food at McDonalds sucks, let’s go eat at Wendy’s instead”:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1604559316237037568

The truth is that any service that won’t let you leave isn’t in the business of serving you, it’s in the business of harming you. The only reason to build a wall around your service — to impose any switching costs on users- is so that you can fuck them over without risking their departure.

The platforms want to be Anatevka, and we the villagers of Fiddler On the Roof, stuck plodding the muddy, Cossack-haunted roads by the threat of losing all our friends if we try to leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

That’s where freedom of exit comes in. The public should have the right to leave, and companies should not be permitted to make that departure burdensome. Any burdens we permit companies to impose is an invitation to abuse of their users.

This is why governments are handing down new interoperability mandates: the EU’s Digital Markets Act forces the largest companies to offer APIs so that smaller rivals can plug into them and let users walkaway from Big Tech into new kinds of platforms — small businesses, co-ops, nonprofits, hobby sites — that treat them better. These small players are overwhelmingly part of the fediverse: the federated social media sites that allow users to connect to one another irrespective of which server or service they use.

The creators of these platforms have pledged themselves to freedom of exit. Mastodon ships with a “Move Followers” and “Move Following” feature that lets you quit one server and set up shop on another, without losing any of the accounts you follow or the accounts that follow you:

https://codingitwrong.com/2022/10/10/migrating-a-mastodon-account.html

This feature is as yet obscure, because the exodus to Mastodon is still young. Users who flocked to servers without knowing much about their managers have, by and large, not yet run into problems with the site operators. The early trickle of horror stories about petty authoritarianism from Mastodon sysops conspicuously fail to mention that if the management of a particular instance turns tyrant, you can click two links, export your whole social graph, sign up for a rival, click two more links and be back at it.

This feature will become more prominent, because there is nothing about running a Mastodon server that means that you are good at running a Mastodon server. Elon Musk isn’t an evil genius — he’s an ordinary mediocrity who lucked into a lot of power and very little accountability. Some Mastodon operators will have Musk-like tendencies that they will unleash on their users, and the difference will be that those users can click two links and move elsewhere. Bye-eee!

Freedom of exit isn’t just a matter of the human right of movement, it’s also a labor issue. Online creators constitute a serious draw for social media services. All things being equal, these services would rather coerce creators’ participation — by holding their audiences hostage — than persuade creators to remain by offering them an honest chance to ply their trade.

Platforms have a variety of strategies for chaining creators to their services: in addition to making it harder for creators to coordinate with their audiences in a mass departure, platforms can use DRM, as Audible does, to prevent creators’ customers from moving the media they purchase to a rival’s app or player.

Then there’s “freedom of reach”: platforms routinely and deceptively conflate recommending a creator’s work with showing that creator’s work to the people who explicitly asked to see it.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

When you follow or subscribe to a feed, that is not a “signal” to be mixed into the recommendation system. It’s an order: “Show me this.” Not “Show me things like this.”

Show.

Me.

This.

But there’s no money in showing people the things they tell you they want to see. If Amazon showed shoppers the products they searched for, they couldn’t earn $31b/year on an “ad business” that fills the first six screens of results with rival products who’ve paid to be displayed over the product you’re seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

If Spotify played you the albums you searched for, it couldn’t redirect you to playlists artists have to shell out payola to be included on:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

And if you only see what you ask for, then product managers whose KPI is whether they entice you to “discover” something else won’t get a bonus every time you fatfinger a part of your screen that navigates you away from the thing you specifically requested:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-fatfinger-economy-7c7b3b54925c

Musk, meanwhile, has announced that you won’t see messages from the people you follow unless they pay for Twitter Blue:

https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-twitter-blue/

And also that you will be nonconsensually opted into seeing more “recommended” content from people you don’t follow (but who can be extorted out of payola for the privilege):

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/Twitter-Expands-Content-Recommendations/637697/

Musk sees Twitter as a publisher, not a social media site:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604588904828600320

Which is why he’s so indifferent to the collateral damage from this payola/hostage scam. Yes, Twitter is a place where famous and semi-famous people talk to their audiences, but it is primarily a place where those audiences talk to each other — that is, a public square.

This is the Facebook death-spiral: charging to people to follow to reach you, and burying the things they say in a torrent of payola-funded spam. It’s the vision of someone who thinks of other people as things to use — to pump up your share price or market your goods to — not worthy of consideration.

As Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax put it: “Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

Mastodon isn’t perfect, but its flaws are neither fatal nor permanent. The idea that centralized media is “easier” surely reflects the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been pumped into refining social media Roach Motels (“users check in, but they don’t check out”).

Until a comparable sum has been spent refining decentralized, federated services, any claims about the impossibility of making the fediverse work for mass audiences should be treated as unfalsifiable, motivated reasoning.

Meanwhile, Mastodon has gotten two things right that no other social media giant has even seriously attempted:

I. If you follow someone on Mastodon, you’ll see everything they post; and

II. If you leave a Mastodon server, you can take both your followers and the people you follow with you.

The most common criticism of Mastodon is that you must rely on individual moderators who may be underresourced, incompetent on malicious. This is indeed a serious problem, but it isn’t the same serious problem that Twitter has. When Twitter is incompetent, malicious, or underresourced, your departure comes at a dear price.

On Mastodon, your choice is: tolerate bad moderation, or click two links and move somewhere else.

On Twitter, your choice is: tolerate moderation, or lose contact with all the people you care about and all the people who care about you.

The interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act (and in the US ACCESS Act, which seems unlikely to get a vote in this session of Congress) only force the largest platforms to open up, but Mastodon shows us the utility of interop for smaller services, too.

There are lots of domains in which “dominance” shouldn’t be the sole criteria for whether you are expected to treat your customers fairly.

A doctor with a small practice who leaks all ten patients’ data harms those patients as surely as a hospital system with a million patients would have. A small-time wedding photographer who refuses to turn over your pictures unless you pay a surprise bill is every bit as harmful to you as a giant chain that has the same practice.

As we move into the realm of smalltime, community-oriented social media servers, we should be looking to avoid the pitfalls of the social media bubble that’s bursting around us. No matter what the size of the service, let’s ensure that it lets us leave, and respects the end-to-end principle, that any two people who want to talk to each other should be allowed to do so, without interference from the people who operate their communications infrastructure.

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

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

Heisenberg Media (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_-_The_Summit_2013.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: Moses confronting the Pharaoh, demanding that he release the Hebrews. Pharaoh’s face has been replaced with Elon Musk’s. Moses holds a Twitter logo in his outstretched hand. The faces embossed in the columns of Pharaoh’s audience hall have been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The wall over Pharaoh’s head has been replaced with a Matrix ‘code waterfall’ effect. Moses’s head has been replaced with that of the Mastodon mascot.]

[interactyouth]

I want to join the interACT youth program so badly, when is that available?

Well, you're 100% allowed to join if you so desire! The youth program is simply a combination of our community spaces (Facebook and Discord) and our advocacy program (such as our yearly advocacy cohort). While our advocacy cohort is application and interview-based, the youth program spaces are accessible to intersex youth ages 13 to 29 after simply answering a demographics questionnaire! interACT is focused on empowering intersex youth to advocate for themselves and their communities--whether interpersonally or against systems, in-person or online, and potentially in solidarity with other advocacy movements--so that's the focus of several of the questions. As a 501(c)3 non-profit advocacy organization, we adhere to different guidelines in running our community spaces. However, if that's not to your preferences, our partners at InterConnect have been hosting all-ages intersex online support group meetings, conferences, and regional hangouts for 25 years that I would highly recommend!

If you're curious about some of interACT's recent accomplishments, we have a 2023 annual report (I'm eager for our 2024 report!) and our Instagram account is actively run by our lovely communications director! We recently hosted a health and wellness retreat in California earlier this month for 20 intersex youth, for instance. <3 This is our Discord invite, and the demographics survey link is also sent to newcomers automatically:

[slavghoul]

Hey Slav!! I didn’t really wanna bring it back up but I’m completely confused on when and why this happened so I’m asking you! Why was Tobias yelling at people exactly? I saw someone say it was because his equipment was being destroyed by the storm but I haven’t heard anything else :(. Anyway thank you!!

There's a detailed explanation of the situation on the band's Instagram page. To give you an idea of the gravity of the situation: consider that just the sound system that the band uses is valued at around $250,000. I’m excluding lighting equipment, instruments, screens, etc. that together make up another +$200k. The equipment is leased and typically right after a tour ends, another artist picks it up. Having it damaged to any extent not only jeopardizes the entire tour but also strains your relationship with the equipment lender, who is also put in a compromised position. I’m assuming they have a force majeure clause in their insurance contract that, hopefully, will cover at least part of the costs, but it’s still a fucky situation to find yourself in, and cancellations must have generated en enormous loss for the band (who believe it or not doesn't actually make millions of profit off touring, quite the opposite). From my experience I can say it's remarkable they were able to secure new equipment on such short notice and no more dates were affected. Things must have seemed dire in the heat of the moment, and I'm pretty sure Tobias was the most stressed man on the planet that day, so if he raised his voice, it was certainly warranted.

[usafphantom2]

Once F-4 crews told the SR-71 couldn’t go vertical after takeoff. They gave up after a Blackbird did a high-performance takeoff (with sensitive equipment replaced with ballast).

The SR-71

The SR-71, the most advanced member of the Blackbird family that included the A-12 and YF-12, was designed by a team of Lockheed personnel led by Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, then vice president of Lockheed’s Advanced Development Company Projects, commonly known as the “Skunk Works” and now a part of Lockheed Martin.

CLICK HERE to see The Aviation Geek Club contributor Linda Sheffield’s T-shirt designs! Linda has a personal relationship with the SR-71 because her father Butch Sheffield flew the Blackbird from test flight in 1965 until 1973. Butch’s Granddaughter’s Lisa Burroughs and Susan Miller are graphic designers. They designed most of the merchandise that is for sale on Threadless. A percentage of the profits go to Flight Test Museum at Edwards Air Force Base. This nonprofit charity is personal to the Sheffield family because they are raising money to house SR-71, #955. This was the first Blackbird that Butch Sheffield flew on Oct. 4, 1965.

The Blackbirds were designed to cruise at Mach 3.2, just over three times the speed of sound or more than 2,200 miles per hour and at altitudes up to 85,000 feet.

Throughout its nearly 24-year career, the SR-71 strategic reconnaissance aircraft remained the world’s fastest and highest-flying operational aircraft. From 80,000 feet, it could survey 100,000 square miles of Earth’s surface per hour.

So, it comes as no surprise if, thanks to its astonishing flight characteristics, the aircraft has set numerous speed and altitude records throughout its career.

Blackbird high performance takeoff

An SR-71 Blackbird mechanic who wishes to remain anonymous tells the following story;

‘I won’t say Who, I won’t say when, but I did see the SR go vertical ONCE and that was at Kadena [Air Base]. The F-4 jocks used to tell us when they were going to do a high-performance takeoff during an FCF (Functional Check Flight) so we could watch a “real takeoff”!

‘Our DET Commander had chewed his lip long enough and the stage was set. We finally had the kind of flight scheduled where the plan could be put in to action.

‘All sensors were removed and replaced with ballast. That included the ballast nose. This didn’t lighten the aircraft, but removed sensitive equipment, gyros and such. On the morning of the launch, the Fighter wing was notified. The SR did its thing getting ready to launch. Brakes released, burners on and once it was up, it accelerated just above the runway. And then, IT HAPPENED. It went vertical in full afterburner. It was loud AND impressive! Needless to say, it shut the F-4 lads up for a while.

‘Written by somebody who knew.’

Be sure to check out Linda Sheffield Miller (Col Richard (Butch) Sheffield’s daughter, Col. Sheffield was an SR-71 Reconnaissance Systems Officer) Twitter X Page Habubrats SR-71, Instagram Page SR71Habubrats and Facebook Page Born into the Wilde Blue Yonder Habubrats for awesome Blackbird’s photos and stories.

Photo credit: Linda Sheffield Miller, Boeing and U.S. Navy

Linda Sheffield Miller

Grew up at Beale Air Force Base, California. I am a Habubrat. Graduated from North Dakota State University. Former Public School Substitute Teacher, (all subjects all grades). Member of the DAR (Daughters of the Revolutionary War). I am interested in History, especially the history of SR-71. Married, Mother of three wonderful daughters and four extremely handsome grandsons. I live near Washington, DC.

@Habubrats71 via X

[letthebookbegin]

useful explanation on the different boycotts BDS is supporting! image IDs under the cut.

[ID: A series of photos taken from the BDS Instagram page. They read:

1. Act Now Against These Companies Profiting from the Genocide of the Palestinian People (this same title is the title for every slide)

The slide is split into four sections as below:

Consumer boycott targets:

AXA

Puma

Carrefour

SIEMENS

AHAVA

HP

Boycott Israeli goods sticker

RE/MAX

Sodastream

Divestment targets:

Elbit Systems

CAT

Barclays

CAF

Chevron

Volvo

JCB

HD Hyundai

TKH Security

HIK Vision

Pressure (NON-BOYCOTT) targets:

Google

Amazon

Airbnb

Booking.com

Expedia

Disney

Organic boycott targets:

Domino's Pizza

McDonald's

Papa John's

Burger King

Pizza Hut

WiX

2. Consumer boycott targets:

AXA

Puma

Carrefour

SIEMENS

AHAVA

HP

Boycott Israeli goods sticker

RE/MAX

Sodastream

The BDS movement calls for a complete boycott of these brands carefully selected due to the company's proven record of complicity in Israeli apartheid.

3. Divestment targets:

Elbit Systems

CAT

Barclays

CAF

Chevron

Volvo

JCB

HD Hyundai

TKH Security

HIK Vision

The BDS movement is pressuring governments, institutions and investment funds to exclude and divest from complicit companies listed in the UN, WhoProfits, and AFSC Investigate databases of businesses enabling Israel's occupation. Above we give some of the targets we are campaigning against.

4. Pressure (NON-BOYCOTT) targets:

Google

Amazon

Airbnb

Booking.com

Expedia

Disney

The BDS movement actively calls for pressure campaigns against these brands and services due to their complicity in Israeli apartheid. We have not, on strategic grounds, called for a boycott of these brands and services, instead we strategically call on supporters and institutions to mount other forms of pressure on them until they end their complicity in Israeli apartheid.

5. Organic boycott targets:

Domino's Pizza

McDonald's

Papa John's

Burger King

Pizza Hut

WiX

The BDS movement did not initiate these grassroots boycott campaigns but is in support of them due to these brands openly supporting Israel's genocide against Palestinians.

[shark-myths]

tell me more about the writing class!

I would loving nothing more!

so my long-time writing crush @alienfuckeronmain (seriously, we became pairing rivals in a now-deceased fandom more than 20 years ago) runs an amazing writing class annually. It is fully virtual and recorded, so you can attend synchronously (I recommend this because the Q&A after the lecture is invaluable!) or whenever works best for you. It focuses on writing as a LIFESTYLE, something sustainable and full of joy, healing the productivity/perfection trauma many of us come to associate with the craft. it focuses not on sharing and critiquing writing but on how to support yourself and your life so that you can DO it, for fun and for love, in a way that works for you. it is such a healthy and beautiful approach to my favorite thing in the world, I highly recommend the course. The website is here and the instagram account, bloodinkbonewriting, also has a lot of info and promo material. Phoenix herself is an incredible talent with some recently published books I highly recommend. She’s most famous for being canceled in various fandoms, writing the finest one direction fic you can imagine, being the master of dead dove and fucked-up dynamics, and of course, humanized Cars fic.

self-disclosure / soapbox time: I work as a psychologist, and I so frequently encounter grown-ass adults who made all the right choices. They put away ‘childish’ things like hobbies and passion and silliness and intensity, they prioritized all the values our culture prizes, and they end up feeling so fucking empty and bleak. I constantly connect to gratitude about my daily writing practice, about my relentless and unprofitable pursuit of writing for joy. I have been writing rpf since I was thirteen years old. I thought I *invented* it and would certainly go to hell for my ingenuity. And it is the richest part of my life. I meet all the best people this way. I love who I am and the way I live because of being connected to art and community—a community of transformative work and creativity and passion, of screeching about our favorite things without self-consciousness or self-erasure. I genuinely believe this is the best part of my self and life. (except for my cats.) and when I encounter the dullness and misery of a life at the grindstone, I know beyond doubt that writing and fandom are my #1 protective factor. They are the reason I don’t feel that burned out and hollow way about my good, good life.

if you do one thing for yourself, find a way to create and connect joyfully and without the evaluative eye of others upon you. and if you have lost the way to doing that with writing because of the world we live in or, worse, the educational system and endless pressure to make your art profitable—blood ink bone has my highest recommendation as a gentle way to recover that path within yourself!

[brian-in-finance]

Video 📹 from Instagram

We were talking, me and my husband* and a friend** of his who's in the hospitality and drinks business, and we were talking about the Arts and how it's been so underfunded here, abroad, everywhere l travelled. Governments are slashing support for the Arts left, right, and centre, and we were talking about "what if we did something where we could use a percentage of the profits to give back, and that the whole ethos of the brand would be that it's about getting artists to help?" We would fund them, we would support them, and in their turn we could have artists use their art and promote it.

We were just riffing and we were "let's try one batch and see what happens." We did something like 2000 bottles and it sold within a day, and were were "that's kind of cool, let's go and do more of this." And when we did that, were were able to take the order, ship it, get it to anywhere in Europe within two days. And then Brexit happened, and it was like, "well you can't do that." And then to ship to the U.S. there's a lot of complicated loopholes because there's a very strange system in the U.S. that still exists since prohibition. And then I got pregnant, so you can't really be flogging booze when you're pregnant, so we just put a pause on everything. And we're about to launch... well, I don't want to give a time because there's still stuff we're sorting out, but we're going again. It's coming soon. Forget Me Not is not (forgotten). — Caitríona Balfe, April 2023

FMN DRINKS (UK) LIMITED, incorporated 14 December 2022. Directors: Caitríona Mary Balfe, Duncan Glen Frew**, Anthony Gerard McGill*

Brian 11 April 2023

Remember… when she talks about “we” in the video, she’s talking about Tony and Glen.

[drdemonprince]

wellllll my following on here has gotten large enough that i now receive the kinds of divorced-from-any-political-awareness messages and comments that provoked me to lock down my insta. it is actively bad for myself and the world to platform that kinda shit.

somebody's gotta be patient and explain introductory concepts to large masses of people but i know its not my calling. i get too impatient. we all have our skills and thank god the whole world isnt filled with people like me.

this app is where i come to have in depth, non introductory discussions about anarchism, queer theory, neurodiversity, abolitionism, systemic analysis of oppression, etc for my own enjoyment and others'. and to get future article suggestions and to shitpost. none of this is advocacy, posting is not ever activism no matter who stands to make a profit by convincing you it is, and i dont want to lead anyone, i want you to read and think about things for yourself. if you want more introductory level talk itll be on instagram, medium, and in my books.

keep the genuine questions and autistic advice article suggestions coming! i will answer things that i want to, but deleting all the stuff that sounds like its coming out of an instagram comment section for a loosely social justice branded influencer

[starlightscythe]

Raining in Manila

Greg Hirsch x f!Reader

Also includes an instagram!AU (idk what it's called but I added some insta interactions)

Plot: you're the Chief of Financials at Waystar Royco and also Logan's Goddaughter, tasked to go with Greg to the Philippines to check up on the xerox business, not knowing some budding feelings will grow along the way.

Warnings: stressed!reader, will add more later.

P.S: purely written for Greg. Fuck Nicholas Braun, man. What a prick.

"So you're half Filipino? All this time?" Greg asked, trailing you from behind. Pushing your heavy baggage cart as you walk with hands free, clutching your phone with your right hand.

"I am 1/4th Filipino, Greg. My grandma, Nerie is the Filipino. Lucky wife to my Grandpa, Victor whose a European." You explained, steps hasty as you walk towards the exit of the NAIA airport.

Greg tried to catch up with you as best as he can with his long legs, pushing the heavy cart with force to walk side by side with you.

You were sent here by Logan to check the Xerox copy machine side business and to evaluate the profit and if it's still considered to be operational by income standards. Waystar is apparently looking to cut their losses even if it means a thousand people would lose their job just to pay off Peirce.

"That's interesting. So you speak the language? B-because you know, what if we got lost and none of us speak the language? Google Translate isn't exactly eh- exact?" He pushes his hair back, adjusting the sleeve of his suit, "Is it normally this hot here?"

"I told you to lose the suit dumbass. It's a tropical country- and you know what-" You paused, stoping by a souvenir shop a saw an English-Tagalog Dictionary, "learn the language while we're here."

Quickly purchasing the book and throwing it at him which he catches clumsily mid-air.

The ride to your hotel was short, doesn't help that Greg was complaing about the tropical heat and how he's sweating underneath his suit.

"Honeymoon?" The Uber driver asked. Smiling at you and Greg from the rear view mirror.

"Uh- oh- no. No. Just work- work mates. Happy workmates" He laughed, "here for work."

"On valentines day?" The driver raised his eyebrow.

"Yeah, unfortunately." You replied, pulling your lips in a tight line as you message an unresponsive Roman about the hotel reservation.

Exiting the Uber and going straight to the hotel lobby whilst Greg was left alone to unload your bags from the trunk. A couple minutes of waiting for him, he finally emerges besides you, tapping your shoulder lightly.

"Oh, took you long enough. Show them the reservation." You spoke, returning your attention to your phone.

Greg stood there confuse, pushing his hair back and wiping his sweat from his forehead, "What reservation? I thought Roman sent it to you?"

"I thought he sent it you?!" You whispered to him, "well, call Kendall and have him sort this out."

"Is there a problem?" The receptionist finally arrived in front of you.

You quickly turned to her and smiled, "no. No. We're all good. He's just sorting out the reservation paper. Such a klutz, this one."

"Well, Ma'am if you just have a name for the reservation and an I.D I can verify it even without the papers." She assured you.

Rummaging through your bag as Greg tried calling Kendall behind you. Taking out your Waystar employee I.D and showing it to her.

"Can you try, (Y/N) Abberdon? I think my collegue might've put it under my name."

The receptionist typed for a bit and shook her head, "we don't have that name in the system Ma'am. Is there any name? Maybe under the name of your collegue?" She gestured to Greg.

Grabbing the man by the I.D which dangled from one of those laces with the retractable strings. "What- hey!" Greg exclaimed, hand still on the ringing phone.

"Try Gregory Hirsch?" You desperately looked at her. The woman did the same thing only to looked up at you once again and shook her head.

Mentally punching Roman in your head at this point, "Ok well, we don't have his I.D but, Roman Roy?"

"I see a Roman Roiland but no Roman Roy, miss. I am sorry."

"Oh my god," You backed away from the reception desk, "I am sorry- just give me a minute" Excusing yourself. The woman nodded her head and returns to her work.

You grabbed Greg by the arm and dragged him away from the desk, looking up at him for an answer.

"They won't call back. I tried Kendall, Shiv, and Roman." He panicked, "I could try Tom?"

"Then try Tom." You deadpanned, "I am going to call Roman. But keep calling whoever is in that flip phone of yours Greg or I will throw that ancient thing in the trash."

"No need to be stres-"

"Don't tell me what to do." You suddenly flipped out at him, making him flinch, "I am- I am sorry. I am just stressed, you're right. This is not big deal. If we can't reach out to any of them we'll just have to book it ourselves."

Greg nods, "yeah. Ok. I'll keep trying to call Tom."

A couple more minutes of you guys looking like anxious rats on your phone trying to contact everyone. Greg finally got a hold of Tom over the phone.

"Tom! Oh thank God. Listen I am- we- yes me and (Y/N)- we're stuck in the Philippines- yeah- can you just- Is Roman with you?- oh- right- uhuh- well, here." Greg hands the phone to you.

You took it out of his hand, "Jesus I forgot how these things work," Fiddling with the flip phone for a bit, "Hello? Tom? What the fuck is going on? Where the fuck is everyone?"

"Enjoying your vacation with my assistant? That you stole by the way. How dare you?!"

"We're not on vacation, dipshit. What's happening over there? We can't get a hold of everyone and we're stuck in another country with no hotel reservation."

"Oh yeah, well. There's been an emergency and Shiv just told me you guys might be stuck in there for another week or two because they're using the private jet to go to the bahamas."

"What the fuck?!" You exclaimed, quickly returning back to your normal tone, "well can you atleast have Roman call me b-"

The phone suddenly crackles and Roman's voice was heard though the phone, "hey god-sis. Yeah listen, I did an oopsie and I kinda forgot to put in a reservation..."

"What's happening...?" Greg tried to ask but your head was running a million miles per minute.

One thing you hated was when plans didn't go as planned and mostly being stucked in another country where you barely speak the language and your American Express might not work.

You raised your hand out of frustration, an attempt to throw Greg's phone onto the ground. But he was quick to catch your arm with his tall physique, snatching his phone out of your hand.

"He-hey. Ok. How about you sit and calm down. Ok?" He tries to comfort you, "I'll handle this. I know you're stressed out so just relax. Ok?"

You nodded, sitting by the nearby sofa of the hotel lobby. Frantically typing into your phone whilst running a hand onto your hair out of frustration.

"Yeah- ok- I can manage that. Ok. Thanks- bye" Greg ends the call and sat on the couch parallel to yours, "ok so, we'll book a hotel and have it on the company card. Shiv said we could do whatever we want for the next two weeks as an apology for your distress and inconvenience. So...there you go. Don't stress ok? Cause youre kinda freaking me out too."

Slowly nodding as you bit your lip, preventing yourself from laughing at the distressed Greg as he sighed and lean back onto the white sofa, putting his earphone on to calm himself down. You sneakily took a picture of him and posted it on Instagram.

"Well I'll just see if they have a spare room available." You pull a tight smile , touching his shoulder as you move past him. Greg gives a nod in response.

"Hey," You greeted the receptionist again, "looks like my collegue might've missed it in his brain to book a reservation, is there a room available for two weeks? Two room separately...preferrably for me and him" Pointing at Greg behind you.

The receptionist tuts as she tapped at her keyboard for a bit, looking appologetic up at you, "sorry, looks like we're all fully booked at the moment. That's normal for valentines Day- oh wait- we have an opening for a honeymoon suite... I am afraid that's the only room available."

"Oh..." You scrunched your face. Scratching the back of your head in frustration, "is there like...another hotel?"

"Well you can try the love hotel from across the street but at valentines week I am afraid all of the hotel right now are fully booked too, miss."

Glancing at your watch, it reads 6:37 pm. And the jet lag was getting to your system. Not really wanting to go out there and dragging Greg around the block you were forced to weigh your options.

"Does it have a couch atleast?"

"Yes ma'am. But I am afraid it only has one bathroom."

"That's fine." You sighed, taking out your business card, "just do it. We're way too tired."

The woman apologized again as she took your card before handing you two keycards for the room. Telling you that your bags will be delivered in your room shortly.

Dragging your feet back to where Greg was, you handed him the other key card by shoving it in his face. Greg took it and read;

"Honeymoon suite?" He asked, looking up at you with wide eyes

"Yeah, not alot of options at valentines day, buddy." You scoffed at him, "you're welcome to run around the block for a new hotel room. They're all fully booked apparently. and I am too tired to argue for separate room. So either suck it up or get out."

Greg grunts in annoyance, standing up and following you anyways.

You turn back at him, "there's a love hotel full of jizz across the street. You're welcome to that"

"Uhuh, and if I get sick because of it, you'd have to be Tom's assistant for as long as it takes."

"He wishes, Greg"

[winteriron-trash]

pinned faq

hi, my name is roman. i used to be a semi-popular winteriron blog, but now this blog is mostly dead. so. rip, gone but not forgotten. but i still get some pretty common questions so here's a one-stop shop for most of them as well as links to the important things.

My Tumblr Fic Masterlist

My Ao3

My (dead) WinterIron Discord Server

Did you write the Tony Stark wifi tower fic?

yes, i wrote that fic! it is by far the most popular thing i've ever written and it will probably outlive me.

I found that fic on [insert site here], do they have your permission?

probably not, no. i have found that fic everywhere. and i mean everywhere. pinterest, wattpad, facebook, instagram, tiktok, mediachomp, and so on. honestly, it's been years and i can't control or chase down every single copy and i have no interest in doing so. i don't love that it was stolen from me (especially on for-profit sites) but it just is what it is. it's a fanfic rite of passage to have your stuff stolen, honestly.

can i do a translation/podfic/write something inspired by one of your fics/posts?

yes! there is always a blanket permission to do any sort of transformative work with my work, especially my older stuff. if it sparks joy and creativity in you, run wild with it. i prefer to be credited, but honestly, i'm just happy to see my stuff still inspiring people.

will you ever write winteriron/mcu fanfic again?

well, you should never say never. but in this case, you might want to say never. i have very little interest in winteriron or the mcu in general outside of nostalgia, and i likely will never write anything substantial for them again. it's sad, i miss it too, but i just don't have that spark for marvel these days. mostly i write dc comics fanfiction.

did you write [insert winteriron fic/post here]?

idk. maybe. probably. i wrote and posted a lot of things. you can scroll the tag on this blog to find all my old posts, some more popular than others. if you think it was me, chances are, it probably was. i got around a lot from like 2018 to 2020.

do you have a tagging system?

i used to but lord if i'm going to use it now. i don't even remember it, so your guess is as good as mine. tbh i just use tags as a place to ramble these days so navigating my blog is about as easy for you as it is for me. which is to say, it's not easy at all. because tumblr's search function is ass. i do know one of my old tags has my deadname in it. you'll probably find it if you look hard enough, but that is what it is.

are you going to revive this blog?

probably not consistently, no. if i have something i really want to say here, i'll say it, but i don't have much interest in maintaining this like i used to. i want to be able to, i miss posting here a lot, i just don't think it'll spark joy for me the way it used to, which sucks but that's just the way things go.

why did you leave this blog?

idk. life happened. i was an 18-year-old fighting chronic health conditions and mental health issues that led to me dropping out of high school so, tumblr sort of fell to the back burner, then got forgotten about entirely. eventually, i lost interest in the mcu as i felt the quality of it took a turn for the worst and i went back to dc, which i'm still into. i read some marvel comics, enjoy an occasional mcu project, but largely i just don't have the interest i used to. it sucks and i miss it, this blog probably kept me alive as a teenager. but now it's mostly just an archive of my past, and i'm okay with that.

can i talk to you/send you an ask/befriend you anyway?

sure, if you want, don't know if i'm good company though. but i'm always open to making friends and reminiscing about winteriron, marvel, and all that good stuff. i've gotta warn you though, tumblr fucking eats my DMs on this blog like no fucking business. i'm regularly fighting it. my discord is devilbonesofmetal if you wanna yell at me there, just say you're from tumblr.

[dissociacrip]

this turned into a long adhd rant whoopsie

it really does suck how people seem to downplay autism and adhd now lol. autism has been reduced to people who can mask and have low support needs and adhd hasn't really changed from its status as a joke.

i don't talk about adhd much but it probably gets in the way of me being able to function just as much, if not more than autism does (in my personal situation) when it comes to mental disability. not showering enough. not cooking. not cleaning my living space properly. forgetting to brush my teeth. dishes sitting in the sink for so long they start getting moldy. only being able to maybe do 1-3 tasks a day maximum because my brain can't organize itself enough to do more than that. difficulty committing to things and being consistent in overarching ways. being late to things a lot. highly impaired verbal recall so i forget things people say to me, forget verbal instructions, etc. on top of the other acutely stressful situations that come with memory and regulating my attention span (e.g. locking my keys in my car or locking myself out of my house when i have a very limited support network to remediate those situations.)

my meds barely touch this stuff for me and i'm not especially inclined to increase the dosage after bordering on psychosis when i was taking 40mg of vyvanse. i've just become so accustomed to living the way that i do (because my case is pretty bad afaik) so i can't just will myself to be another way. any efforts i make to change or be more organized and routine and consistent end up getting dashed away because i just cannot do it lol. my shit just doesn't work. adhd is a massive barrier between me and being a functioning person or being able to take care of myself. i'm pretty sure would still be a "gross" and unpalatable disabled person even if my muscles worked and i didn't have POTS/etc. that also get in the way of my hygiene and the cleanliness of my living space.

that doesn't even go into how other people react to it. a good chunk of physical and verbal abuse i faced from my family as a child was related to my adhd symptoms. i was diagnosed at a young age but my parents "forgot" it happened and it was never addressed otherwise. i got constantly called disgusting for my hygiene problems and was threatened with violence over it (on top of the times where i was actually getting assaulted.) people take my impaired verbal recall and lack of impulse control irt accidentally cutting people off or interrupting them personally, accusing me of not caring enough when it's something that is extremely difficult to be aware of or manage when adhd is a condition that distinctly involves impaired awareness of your own behavior.

so when i see shit like "just set alarms" or anything else that amounts to "you're not trying hard enough" or adhd not very much being a disability, especially when it's coming from other people w/ adhd, it kinda makes me wanna stab things with knives.

sure, it's not the worst condition ever, but just like most other disabilities, the way it affects everyone who is it is different and some are gonna be able to manage it better than others. sure, there a lot of really fucking annoying people (usually able-bodied) w/ adhd on social media that have large platforms and who very often profit from or encourage liberal pop psych bullshit when it comes to adhd, but it's still very much a disability. it can affect hygiene. it can affect employment or otherwise means of earning an income. it can affect our social lives and whether we have a support system. it can affect whether someone can keep their house from getting infested with bugs or mold. it is very much something that causes dysfunction in ways that aren't nearly as cutesy as the little comics you might see on instagram are drawn.

just remember that.

[midesastremanifiesto]

Look, I'm not going to pretend I know either of the two, but leclerc was NOT SPORTSMANLIKE. That is the thing, they aren't bebies, but also?? ? why hit lando on purpose? That was a tantrum. If people are saying so much stuff about lance it also applies to cl16, because they did the same thing.

Also even Fred didn't backed up cl16 statements

Hope carlos is surrounded of a good support system.

Its such a cop out to say carlos "camp" shades leclerc when leclerc himself (also his mom) do this stuff. And get away with it because it's so trendy hating on carlos. Love does blind people out of coherent thoughts. No one is asking to stop loving the dude, just that he did unsportsmanlike stuff.

It's insane the way cl16 fans also treated seb back then and nowadays? All love. So much hypocrisy. What are they gonna say about lewis?

Because lewis is an incredible driver, bigger than the sport, more profitable, out there campaign for equal rights, for Palestine, for LGBT rights, and so many stuff. Charles is what? Doing a helmet in homage about a couple of Instagram followers? In the spanish gp? Is that what he will try with lewis?

Sorry for the rant 😅

no worries anon! I can't wait for next year ngl, it's going to be ... interesting to see Lewis and Charles dynamic