This is unfortunately a very Santa Barbara story but I was morbidly curious if a certain old restaurant infamous for holding onto a racist name was still in business and the answer is yes, but they ~finally~ changed the name… in 2020, in response to the George Floyd protests. Lots of vaguely […]

Takes like this are very tempting but IMO go too far. The polling miss last night was historically exactly average for a primary — no evidence polls have gotten worse recently. And remember 2022 had the most accurate House and Senate polls in history! bsky.app/profile/gell...

Adam Serwer@adamserwer.bsky.social · 12h ago

There’s no actual alternative to polling but I just don’t believe they capture public sentiment in any reliable way anymore

I am very frustrated with FOSS at the moment now that I can no longer let Adobe crap save the day. Inkscape has been giving me all kinds of issues and I had to give up on using the better font because it simply can't recognize its existence. So after all the frustration and compromise, I just […]

Looks like El Sayed has this #uspol

reposting this every time I see some hopelessly naive trans person post their new ID

This datacenter company (Tract) is planning a major installation Southeast of me that builds around historic petroglyphs, in an area full of piñon pines.

Center for a Stateless Society » On Larken Rose: The “Economics” the Left “Doesn’t Understand” Gets Dumber Every Day https://c4ss.org/content/61260

The thing about the ways that AI is influencing people's writing or other aesthetic choices is it isn't even necessarily conscious or deliberate. I was just jumpscared by someone liking an old photo of mine on flickr and being shocked by how bad it looks. It's not usually my style to stop down […]

I strongly feel that colonization is to a significant degree a matter of mindset and that it is colonizer propaganda to treat a given outcome as an unavoidable result of mere juxtaposition. This is not to deny that power imbalances are ever so steep as to preclude being able to meet as equals […]

Shopping around for laptop cases and travel stuff makes me think of the weirdness of gender expression. If I, looking like I do, were to use a pink case or carry a pink purse, it would look extremely heterosexual. As in, I'm 100% a cis man and that's definitely my wife's (which is preposterous […]

My inner child is mostly just impressed that I haven't already been done in by quicksand, spontaneous combustion or the Bermuda triangle.

@futurebird If you have any influence on creators, let them know about Camradery, a creator-owned cooperative that works like Patreon, but functions without any of the venture capital funded enshitification. https://comradery.co/

Comradery

Collect money from your subscribers on a cooperatively owned platform

comradery.co

Today I learned that baby cranes are called "colts" because their legs are so long and they can run around like idiots shortly after hatching. This is delightful, I enjoy knowing this.

The Venn diagram of people who think they'd have a girlfriend if not for abortion and the people who see crowds as evils that warrant campaigns of ethnic cleansing may not be a perfect circle, but I suspect a shocking amount of overlap. Also weird how no one thinks their soulmate would exist if […]

JKR bullying Amnesty International, which has stood up to literal dictators, is further proof of what I've been saying for years, which is that TERFs are basically like Scientologists. They will use their lawyers to scare people away from criticizing them.

Exactly. This whole thing seems to be superfluous discovery due to incentives created by intellectual property law. Had Anthropic continued to train their models on pirated content, they could do so without depleting the knowledge commons. But for legal reasons, they destroy books instead. 🧵

maia arson crimew 🏴@crimew.gay · last wk.

the solution to anthropic ripping up millions of books isnt more copyright by the way, theyre doing this Because of copyright

Bad actors have the resources to flood the internet with their propaganda in order to bias chatbots, which have been demonstrated to be able to change people's opinions, in favor of what they want people to believe. Ordinary people just trying to survive and have freedom and safety have to […]

Folks. It is absolutely true that Arabs are Semitic people. It is, however, not true that the meaning of the word "antisemitism" includes Arabs, because etymology isn't destiny. Analogously, "homophobia" doesn't mean "fear of sameness". We can just say "anti-Arab racism" or "Islamophobia" as needed!

"A good rule of thumb is that the more you have to type, the more semantic your HTML is. Hence why we can no longer use <blink> or <marquee> and instead must write god knows how many lines of CSS to accomplish the exact same result. Typing is a ritual we perform to sanctify our HTML. The more […]

Anyone who thinks an Amy Acton victory won’t convince Democrats to adopt anti-trans stances should read any related thread on /r/Ohio. The number of liberals and Democrats that have now fully adopted trans sports bans being good in Ohio is unreal.

Erin Reed@erininthemorning.com · 6d ago

1. In the aftermath of forcing the Ohio Progressive Caucus to delete criticism of Amy Acton for calling trans girls "boys," progressives were promised a meeting with Acton. Now, we have learned she didn't show up, and kicked trans people out of the meeting. Subscribe to support our journalism.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@thomasjwebb/116976420936390278 Bumping because a friend is asking me about this too (same friend who inspired me to make my website backwards-compatible, like hers). She brought my attention to this https://1mb.club/blog/https-redirects/ which does make good […]

Thommy@thomaswebb.net · 2w ago

What are people's thoughts about keeping websites backwards-compatible with older browsers by having an http (non-ssl) option? I figure if I only refrain from redirecting to https on matching agent strings associated with older browsers/OSes, then there is less likelihood of someone […]

Firing Haitians because the government announced that they're going to lose their temporary protected status is a perfect example of complying in advance. Taking a source of income away from someone who may endure legal fees to stay where they are is especially fucked up. The federal government […]

Sometimes people compare dragons who hoard gold to capitalists and I think this is not quite right, at least not if you're thinking about robber-barons. A gold-hoarding dragon is like an eccentric nouveau riche small business owner who's paranoid and very conservative in their investments. They […]

Per the Streisand effect, Paul Fusco's attempt at a performance art where Alf is treated as a real alien had the opposite effect. He made it so that Alf being definitely a puppet is now one of the most famous facts about him. He could have done it where it's slightly more relaxed and a lot more […]

In my humble brown opinion, the trans rights movement urgently needs to draw from decolonial movements which have successfully toppled entire regimes by creating radical organizations that encourage and publicize targeted boycotts of specific companies that fund and enable genocide.

am i allowed to talk about how weird it is that the main way liberals philantropize trans people is by donating money to liberal nonprofits for call centers that beg us not to kill ourselves, instead of directly funding our material needs which, when deprived, lead to suicidality? is that allowed?

mady castigan✨ 🏳️‍⚧️@mady.cat · 6d ago

Sorry i meant to say we need more celebrities to donate $100 million to suicide hotlines so we can call someone who will beg us not to kill ourselves when the state takes away our medication and housing, and then send the cops to our home if we say the wrong series of words. My bad.

My wife noted that Jimothy looks like a yokai, but especially an azuki-arai (azuki bean washer): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azukiarai And there are even theories that this myth originated from seeing a short-spined fox or tanuki.

Azukiarai - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Democratic candidate in Ohio is likely a full-blown TERF. Once again, Dems are going to ask marginalized people to accept a position that's worse than the status quo, with effects lasting well past a single administration assuming the campaign is even successful for the sake of the larger […]

I'm interested in reading the book in question, about language extinction.. Here's a response to a review of it: "Discourses and narratives – the stories we tell about things, and the ways we tell them – are not harmless or abstract. They do things, and have concrete effects. For centuries […]

Just like how a Yankee is an American outside of the US, a Northerner in the American South (Southeast US), a specific kind of Northerner in the North (broader Northeast US) and so on, I realize part of the reason it rubs me the wrong way when businesspeople suggest that I work in IT is that […]