#and the censorship is insane right

[oobbbear]

Me standing here watching Americans praising China like it’s heaven on earth like you do realize the system is beyond fucked there right it’s important to me that you know that 🧍‍♂️

[ceoandslutler]

i hope you all know procensorship ideology is a real issue in academia right now. the fact my lecturer shared a source claiming that a woman's writing is the justification for the us' foreign policy is insane*and evil.

*'[this] is insane' as in this is unbelievable not mentally ill

the book is about reading banned books btw. it's not a call to war, it's not "normalising", "fetishising", or whatever the new buzzword the anti fiction crowd are spouting these days. her book is best described by its title "reading lolita in tehran", and that's what it's about: reading books you're not allowed to read.

im dismantling this talking point in my essay atm

also you guys don't understand they're banning khaled hosseini books it's so over 😭😭

let go of that word PLEASE 🙏

to clarify the kite runner contains the sexual abuse of a little boy and a thousand splendid suns contains rape but it is not "romanticised"

THIS IS DOING IRREVOCABLE HARM ESPECIALLY TO ETHNIC MINORITIES!!

THESE AUTHORS DESERVE TO BE HEARD WITHOUT BEING BLAMED FOR THE ACTIONS OF WESTERN COLONIAL POWERS.

why must you not create in fear that someone with unsavoury intentions will take your writing as a call to "do something"? whether it's a man reading a dark romance and thinking it's ok to stalk a woman or the us population reading a book of eastern struggle and thinking it's ok to "liberate" it (and backing a military invasion). this is the fault of the people who do these things, not the fault of authors.

and it doesn't take a genius to see that if we start banning writing this or that and calling everything "problematic", eventually the only people permitted to create are those holding power over others.

all this to say: no matter how icky something is and how much you hate it, never tell people they shouldn't or are not allowed to write or express themselves through books, art, etc...

[baby5fanclub]

so how come i always liked acesan even after i realized they barely interacted when i read the manga, and now i’m watching alabasta and ace is just?? there???

honestly obsessed with the ace filler + simple ace presence and if he’s gonna have a yaoi moment with sanji in the process you know what so be it.

[aeide-thea]

thinking abt (1) that post abt how most censorship is preemptive self-censorship¹ (2) bras²

⸻ ¹ wow, tumblr search actually worked for once??? ² i do understand and respect that for many people bras serve an actual structural function wrt support/comfort! however, for many other people (hi!) they do not, at least in everyday non-sports contexts, and that's the set of concerns i'm speaking to here.

[blackwolfmanx4]

TikTok Ban!

You live in the land of the free ... unless the government says otherwise.

[extraaa-30]

nah we're not losing these tags or comments y'all are too funny & right

The way good omens fans post like they are being paid by the anti gay sex lobby. Like at this point there’s so little separating them from a Florida PTA meeting

[whiteowl-18]

Dear Americans, get a VPN right now. I promise you, the orange man is going to mess with online privacy. Censorship and surveillance are going to be insane. Protect your privacy. This post explains the importance of a VPN quite well (it's from 2017, but it still holds up). Do some research on which VPN you should get. Do not get one from any of the countries in the 14 eyes alliance or those that cooperate with them (read the post linked above for more information). I'm not American, but I use Proton VPN, which is located in Switzerland (I use it mostly for torrenting). Protect yourselves. Times are going to be tough.

[wilwheaton]

Musk has become a transnational vector for far right political violence. NYT doesn’t mention that. And finally, most insane of all, NYT doesn’t mention that Elon Musk has, more than once, joked about assassination and Kamala Harris. After the Secret Service reached out to him the first time, Musk repeated the claim in the last week, joking with Tucker Carlson. NYT calls this — repeated “jokes” about assassinating Kamala Harris — “insult[ing the Democratic Party’s] candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.” Elon Musk isn’t helping Trump get elected, NYT’s excuse for posting this puff piece. He’s helping Trump stoke fascism. And rather than explaining the risk, NYT simply buries it.

NYT "Censors" Elon Musk's Jokes about Assassinating the Vice President and His "Censorship" of JD Vance Dossier

[yumejiqued]

" Well, tell your parents you're proship! "

Tell your parents that you harass and leak personal information over fiction. Tell them that you think this is okay. Tell them that you're telling people to kill themselves over things that aren't real. Tell them that. Tell your parents you support censorship.

Your parents are going to think you're fucking insane. They're likely going to punish you. Rightfully. Because y'all aren't the ones in the right. Never have been or will be. Hell, they might fucking take legal action. I HOPE THEY DO.

Nothing that Proship, Comship OR darkship folk ship or support (in FICTION.) is illegal. Doxxing is! Harassment and cyberstalking/cyberbullying is!! Pushing someone to suicide is technically murder!! Murder is illegal!

Maybe when proshippers tell people about how it actually is, like therapists and whatnot... normal people don't say: " Yeah, you need to commit self-oof. "

Maybe, just maybe! Hypothetically! We might actually be the normal ones! No matter how much misinformation you spread, there will never be a point in time where you are right. At all.

Also, if your morals are so fucked that fiction can sway it:

Get off the Internet. You're not in a good enough state of mind to be here.

[qqueenofhades]

Their not going to get away with banning porn. They didn't think it through.

Religious right-wing fascists have spent literally all of history trying to ban porn, outlaw certain types of sex, legislate and punish what people are and are not allowed to do in the bedroom, so forth and etcetera. This also has a long, LONG history in America, in keeping with MAGA's desire to take us back to the economic and social climate of the 1870s (look up the Comstock Acts). In the exceedingly, EXCEEDINGLY unlikely event a full-bore "porn ban" was ever to pass and be signed into law, it would instantly get the bejesus sued out of it by about eighty different organizations and entities on First Amendment grounds, and given that there is long legal precedent for such challenges about "obscene material," said lawsuit would very likely win.

As such, I'm not worried about that so much as the braindead online leftist chorus that will immediately start up with some drivel about how Fascists Trying To Ban Porn Is Aktually A Good Thing, Because Sex is Yuckicky and We Totally Aren't Puritan Reactionaries With The Name Changed. They will be affectedly or genuinely ignorant of the fact that when Republicans roll out their latest Anti Porn Crusade TM, they have no intention of actually stopping porn. What they really want is to target queer and trans identities, women, any material that opposes Trump, or anything else that can fit under the conveniently flexible label of "obscenity." They want to ban mainstream romance novels from public libraries and arrest people (read: women) from reading or writing it. They want to criminalize queer people's existence as "harmful to children," since that's also what they've done for literally forever, and lay the groundwork for outlawing any queer expression in public. They have very clearly stated their intention to attack birth control, contraception, and no-fault divorce, the next step after outlawing abortion, as part of their ever-more-crazed crusade to likewise force women back to the 1870s (see above) and have no options but to stay at home married and pregnant. They have not been particularly subtle about this.

As such, any Republican "porn ban," however useless it ends up being, will receive scads of support from said online leftists vigorously insisting that it is somehow a good thing, for reasons. This will once again provide it cover and reframe it as Actually A Righteous Attack On Those Nasty Wrong Sex Havers (Ew). It will get derailed as people blubber insane straw men arguments about Why Can't We Just Punish Evil Sex Crime Doers! All of what it actually means will be ignored, swept under the carpet, or idiotically defended. And that is yet again the problem, because there is literally no Good Censorship that magically leads to a More Morally Pure Society. The people who think that are just as deluded as the Republicans, and it will once more make everything far more stupid than it need to be. Then again, this is the stupidest timeline, but still.

[worlds-worst-ships]

Do you seriously, actually ship it?

Okay. Lets talk. Because apparently some of you are defending... well... "that" (under the cut)

"He's autistic! It was a stim!"

If you genuinely think that this has ANYTHING to do with autism, you are an objectively stupid person. Like, your brain is so fucking smooth, it puts the surface of freshly tempered glass to shame. You're a barely functional reprobate with subhuman intelligence who has no idea how to form thoughts so you let a 50 year old billionaire who spends too much time on his phone decide your thought process for you.

"He was throwing his heart out to the crowd!"

Now, I don't really play baseball, basketball, netball, or any sport where you throw anything other than sometimes darts, but... is that how you throw? You perfectly extend your arm at that angle? Twice? After spending years posting tweets that very much align with Nazi viewpoints? Do you throw a pitch in baseball and scream SIEG HEIL as the ball hurtles towards your opponent? No. Stop being a fucking idiot. This was deliberate. He did it twice.

"He's autistic! He doesn't know better!"

Please comment if you actually think this so I can personally call you a stupid cunt and block you. We absolutely do know better. Autism and Nazism aren't mutually exclusive.

"You're inhibiting his free speech!"

1st amendment only applies to censorship from government positions of power, which I am not, as should be obvious from the fact that I have no power to censor him. Though I shouldn't have to explain that.

"Well, he's gonna get away with it so stop being so sensitive!"

Yes. He is. But that's not a flex, that's A FUCKING MASSIVE PROBLEM. Call me sensitive if you want, but absolutely every single one of you should be offended by this. Did you pay attention in history class, or were you too tired after a long night of being fucking railed raw and bone dry by propaganda on Twitter? Moron.

"Well, he's rich and you're not, so there!"

Yep. Got me there. He's rich, and I'm not. Yknow, Hitler and a lot of Nazi officers were pretty minted too. So was Epstein, King Leopold, Stalin, Jimmy Saville, every MP currently serving in parliament... but sure, they're great people because they're rich, right?

"You're just a stupid offended libtard!"

Google "The Holocaust".

"Well, you're still using his app!"

His app? You mean the one he bought, then fucking ruined because he has no idea how to run it, right? And you because its basically impossible to find mutuals as a vtuber without it, you knew that, right? "His" app, please, you probably think Ronald McDonald makes your burger when you order McDonalds, you moron.

"If we punish Elon for this, then that's a violation of the first amendment!"

You mean like banning tiktok, removing any and all talk of election rigging, then putting it back up the next day? Or maybe like deleting any criticisms of you and your nazi salutes under your recent tweets despite it blowing up everywhere else? Or does that not count because its something you agree with? Yeah. You've been cucked harder than Sneako and you don't even realize it. Elon and his government buddies are leaving your free speech rights looking like this

Aaaaanyway

I find it well and truly laughable that so many people like Elon will say all this insane shit and do all these fucking heinous things and people will defend them. Like how that gun woman who shit herself says stuff like "I'm not homophobic, I just think gay people are disgusting and that they should die" or that comedian nobody finds funny anymore spends hours whining about trans people but says he's not transphobic.

Lets all be on the same page for once and have the balls to say what we actually think. Elon got so close, but being a spineless edgelord who doesn't have the balls to just say what he thinks out loud is quite the weakness.

[ajaxbell]

Fangs of Fortune (Bai Ze Ling): perfect on pure aesthetics alone, but also it will tear your heart out while being very gay.

I was lured in to this show by Tumblr gifsets and friends on Bluesky talking about how queer and poly this show is. I'm old and I've been in fandom more than half my life. I know how to read queer subtext. I'm also pretty well versed in cdramas, so again, I know how to read subtext. So I went into this ready to, well, read the subtext.

But no this show is just puts the queer it right there in the text. The vague information we have about Chinese censorship repeatedly left me asking, 'wait how are they getting away with this?' Like some of these jokes and implications are just so blatant it seems incredible this show ever made it to being broadcast. It just feels very much like queer media made for queer people even if t's more subtle than something western like Queer as Folk.

Even without the heavy coloring of gay this show is incredible and so much more than I expected from the title and the promo. The premise is essentially the death of the goddess, who governed relations between humans and demons, leads to an influx of demons in the human world. This brings together the goddess's disciple, Wen Xiao--seeking to restore the goddess's power. WX's childhood sweetheart, Zhuo Yichen--seeking to restore the demon-hunting bureau after the powerful demon Zhu Yan killed his father and brother. It opens on Zhu Yan, in human disguise as as Zhao Yuanzhou, volunteering to help the imperial court restore the demon-hunting bureau to quell the chaos. They are joined by Pei Sijing, a retired female general from the rival demon hunting sect, and a very young doctor (and comic relief) named Bai Jiu. It starts off as a sort of monster-of-the-week with a grim Scooby gang doing detective work and fighting monsters. Each major demon has a mini arc that relates to the larger case (restoring the power of the goddess to balance the realms), and they are repeatedly blocked by either the demons or the rival demon hunting sect. Each mini arc also acts as a mirror or parallel story to slowly revealed backstory of all the main characters as well. In true cdrama fashion it's a mix of adventure, intense emotional drama, romance, and comedy. And queer and poly jokes and romance. It also has a kind of manga vibe in the way the comedy is woven into the more serious story, and in the fantastical depiction of the characters and how the story unfolds.

It is also just insanely beautiful. Every single shot is lovely. The costumes, make up, and hair are incredible. The casting director made all the major demons inhumanly beautiful. The sets are spectacular. The effects are nicely done. Every bit of has the vague surreality of a fairytale. The perfection of each shot ads to the manga vibe, as if we're seeing each critical storytelling panel come alive. There's recurring water-based special effects that are just gorgeous. Based on aesthetics alone this show would be worth watching to me. That it is combined with a complex, very emotional story is a spectacular gift to the watcher. A lot of the negative reviews of this complain about the staginess or that it's overly contrived in how each scene is shot. But I think it's gorgeous, works perfectly with the storytelling, and if we criticize art on whether it achieves the goal it intended then this show is doing exactly and perfectly what it means to do and doing it beautifully.

Additionally the acting is also very good, but Neo Hou is the stand out for sure. I enjoyed him in Back from the Brink, especially the later part of the story, but in Fangs of Fortune he's transformed, utterly embodying the role, the way Dylan Wang is Dongfang Qingcang in Love Between Fairy and Devil. Neo Hou has the right look, a slightly uncanny beauty perfect for a gorgeous immortal not of this world. The show does incredible things with his styling between the various looks and personas the role requires. But in acting he somehow manages to utterly transform his face and demeanor to manifest each aspect of the character as story demands changes from him.

There is a lot of crying in this drama. Like early on I joked that there was going to be a character crying a single perfect tear in every ep. Lol nope. Multiple single perfect tears per ep and many outright full on sobbing scenes. This show is just waiting to rip your heart out and you see it right from the beginning. But it was such sweet pain all the way through. Just a truly engaging and utterly wrenching set of intertwined stories.

My only criticism is that the pacing falls apart in the last 3 episodes. But overall the story is solid through the end, though like so many cdramas, it's saved by the epilogue.

You should absolutely watch it if you want the chaotic bi polycule (it's her, her girlfriend, her boyfriend, her boyfriend's boyfriend who is also her boyfriend, their two idiot sons, and her boyfriend's ex-who is also eventually sort of his boyfriend again), or if you want your heart torn out and stomped on. Or even if you just like really gorgeous cinematic things. Also if you watch, please don't skip the ending credits, as they change as the arcs change, and the radiant joy Tian Jiarui has as he dances is an excellent antidote to the emotions of each episode.

[formulatrash]

sorry to like, keep going on about this but as a (former?) media professional: seeing so many comments on @wearewatcher's video saying "I would fire people so I didn't have to charge for content" and accusing WATCHER of being capitalist about it is actually insane.

you used to have to pay for content. you had to pay like £16 to watch one whole movie on DVD. this is because it cost money to make and people were supposed to be paid for it. remember the writers' strike because streaming now only benefits executives with no equanimous income distribution model for the people who create the stuff you love?

you are meant to root for the independent creators. you are not meant to want all content to be beholden to an algorithmic nightmare that ransoms what creators can make or monetise for its own arbitrary censorship. you are not meant to root for a platform that works to silence and limit people under oppressive regimes. you are not meant to demand that you get content only on something that platforms and promotes right wing prejudice.

employing people is good!!!!!!! you are meant to want people to be fairly paid for their work even and especially when that work goes into creating things you love and get enrichment from

yes you are also meant to share your subscription with your friends. OUR login details. THAT'S fucking socialism.

[goawaypopup]

Look Outside Posting Part 5: Static

If you didn't bother to go back and check the laptop regularly, you might have missed this.

You wouldn't be missing a whole lot, to be honest. There aren't many answers to be found from the news or social media. But there is something strange to be learned there.

As the weeks continue, photos posted on social media begin to appear as nothing but colorful noise. This seems to specifically happen to the photos that are posted by Witnesses, and Witnesses comment on the photos as if they were normal; everyone else is mystified.

We can rule out a few reasons this might be happening right away. If it were due to some kind of atmospheric interference coming from the Visitor, it would be happening to all data, not just images. If it were some kind of effect from trying to capture footage of the outside at all, the VHS footage and photograph of the Visitor wouldn't be useful.

Rather, I think this is censorship being applied manually on the social media site Sam is using.

With an infohazard readily visible in the sky, and a large contingent of the userbase talking about wanting to force people to look, photos of the Visitor would be a huge safety concern.

A lot of news sites are down a few days in, and I'm pretty sure social media should be no different, but it remains operational over the full 15 days. Like the electricity, and Placide's control over the building's pipes, this likely means someone is still upkeeping the servers. Someone who's already looked, and therefore isn't at risk from any unfiltered photos.

The corrupted images start to appear a few days in, and only become ubiquitous after a while, when very few people remain online who haven't somehow been turned. We don't know for sure that it's specifically and only Witnesses' images being targeted, but what we do know aligns well with that.

Most Witnesses are very visible online. They use the eye emoji to identify themselves, and post about the Witness/Coward discourse or about looking outside themselves. Manually labeling them all to apply hidden account restrictions would still be a superhuman task, but it would reduce the load massively compared to moderating images by hand.

I was pretty perplexed by Witnesses interacting with glitched photos as if they were normal. Even if most of them are kind of crazy and up to a lot of groupthink, people who are cursed are just too unpredictable for me to believe that every single one would play along and keep posting garbled pictures. I think that they CAN see them. If they're already getting flagged as Witnesses behind the scenes, it would be easy to lift the filter for them.

This is kind of an insane thing to implement at a time like this, but whoever is doing this clearly has some interesting priorities in the first place, to be working so hard just to allow people to continue to post images at all.

In a rolly chair in a dimly-lit office somewhere, or possibly entangled in the circuitry of the servers themselves, sits a passionate content moderator, steadfastly committed to the end user experience, come hell or high water.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

It's such a topsy-turvy world. All the old lines and allegiances have been turned on their heads. The liberal left is now the side of insanity, delusion, censorship, racism and war, and whatever now gets called "the right" is increasingly an umbrella term for science, reason, sanity, freedom of speech and global peace. It's crazy to me that I've actually watched this changeover happen in my one lifetime.

[dangermousie]

When they announced they were making a sequel to 2017's big drama Princess Agents, I was one of the people wondering if they lost their minds utterly.

Yes, the drama adapted only half the novel and ended on an open ending most of the fandom hated (I, however, was in a small minority who adored the ending because it seemed fitting, but I blabbed about this before so won't rehash.) And yes, the drama made enough stir that it would make sense to make a sequel.

BUT!

This is a drama from 2017, it's been eight years!

Under its bright colors, it has an incredibly grim storyline, the bulk of which would have huge issues with passing censorship nowadays - the whole premise is whether you will or won't maintain your morals in a horrifying world and rebellion against unjust royal rule. Both the warlords who our FL loves at one or another point in the story end up destroying/ruling on the ruins of the brutal corrupt empire of the start of the story. (The world may not end up a paradise in the areas ruled by them, but at least they don't do freaking child hunts!)

Zhao Liying, Lin Gengxin and Shawn Dou, Li Qin, Deng Lun etc - it had an insanely heavy hitter cast - were never going to come back; even if they did, they'd be much too old.

I saw they were going forward, I saw the cast (I loooove Li Yunrui; also by having YY be the most famous actor in the cast, I think they are shifting the story to him as a protagonist which is fine; nobody could control and dominate the story the way Zhao Liying's Chu Qiao did, and HYTT has been great in everything I've seen her in; not familiar with Zhang Kang Le but he looks the part), and was cautiously curious because of the cast and fondness of trainwrecks.

And now they released a trailer (@aysekira I am in your debt):

https://weibo.com/tv/show/1034:5145155632824340?from=old_pc_videoshow

And I want want want want WANT!!!! It looks amazing! Grim and glorious and I think they will get around censorship by focusing on warlord v warlord instead of the empire taking down that happened before. Which is fine!

I still can't see it as a PA sequel but as a drama in its own right? PLSSSSS