Judge Halts The Onion's Infowars Takeover to Review Auction Process
The Onion's winning bid for the assets of Alex Jones' bankrupt conspiracy-theory site Infowars is under further review.Todd Spangler (Variety)
Alexa Devreux-Swift likes this.
Yay! I got a sibling to turn on the Bluesky/AP bridge!
Hi Aris! @RS
(Also someone on github said my side of the bridge might fix if I mention someone on the other side lol)
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Cool! Am I correct in my understanding that other people over there can follow me as fed.brid.gy/bsky/tadaris... and it'll all magically link?
@RS Yep, it's translating requests from ActivityPub (Mastodon, Friendica, etc) to AT (Bluesky) and back.
It's opt-in though, which is why you needed to follow the bridge account: @ap.brid.gy on the Bluesky side and @Bridgy Fed for Bluesky on the other
RS likes this.
PersnicketyDoodles
Alicia/Alice | (she/they) 🎨 Illustration, Comics, Character Art, Fan ArtI don't take commissions at the moment.Please do not to edit or repost my art without permission.persnickety-doodles (Tumblr)
Lord, The Gamers Youtube series has been fantastic and such a satisfying ending to the season, dear god I hope they get to keep making it.
(Context: this is a follow up to a whole series of movies starting with The Gamers)
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Shiri Bailem likes this.
Holy shit, today I learned... now I can at least follow people on Bluesky without having to make an account... (Bonus because Friendica supports RSS natively, but y'all on Mastodon and similar will probably benefit from this)
One of my favorite people is now on blue sky, and I dont want to create a bluesky account just to follow him.Fortunately every blue sky account has an rss feed, and RSSParrot can create a fediverse account for me to follow so I can get my favorite twitch streamer's bluesky updates right in my mastodon timeline: rss-parrot.net/
#RSS #Mastodon #BlueSky #RSSParrot
RSS Parrot
Home of RSS Parrot, a free Fediverse service that lets you turn Mastodon into an RSS or Atom feed reader.rss-parrot.net
Ike likes this.
My instance is currently running on a rented dedicated server, but in the next few weeks gets transferred back down to my own local hardware. But it still doesn't cost nothing to run even after that (power, internet, upgrades, backups, time).
I literally never received a donation, but I keep trucking on.
That said, running your own instance is rewarding and I definitely encourage shared hosting solutions.
The power of the fediverse is decentralization which doesn’t happen by accident. If you’re on a server you love then support it financially, but if you’re thinking of changing servers consider spinning up your own.The cost of managed hosting via @fedihost is the same as what I was previously contributing to my prior server, but now I have complete control of my experience.
fedihost.co/register?refer=Hau…
#Mastodon #PeerTube #Pixelfed #Fediverse #Decentralize #KeepSocialSmall
Shiri Bailem likes this.
wait a minute. Trans people are the real Americans!
/j /j idek what I’d be starting with this omfg /j
Random weekend note: I never thought I'd be proud of myself for assuming the fetal position before...
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Context: there's a local haunted house called Scare For A Cure that raises money for charity and is fully volunteer run. (Last year raised $50k for the Breast Cancer Research Center and also distributed thousands in scholarships and other donations). Additionally this isn't your typical "here's a series of themed rooms and spooks and nothing more", Scare runs a full plotline with interactivity, you do stuff and have a story you're participating in... in addition to getting shot with about a half dozen gore cannons within one hour...
I've been volunteering in different roles throughout the month, with some interruptions here and there. On Saturday, the final night of the event, I was resetting "Jekyll and Hyde's secret storeroom". This involved sneaking in behind groups to replace the mcguffin (a vial of serum) and reset the exit portal. Normally this involves sneaking down the hallway as soon as they're in the storeroom, waiting for the moment they exit the store room to slip in, reset it, then slip back out into the hallway and out a side door... but if groups run close together, I might have to wait in the store room as one group enters the hallway and the next group lingers in the next space, the moment they leave I slip out the door behind them and slip between the buildings to get back to my starting position.
One group however... they were moving so slow and had zero consideration for the fact that there's a production that cares about timing... they caused 2 groups to pile up right behind them. So resetting after them I had to duck into the next room instead of returning back... but then the group right after them was stuck waiting a really long time in that space before they could move forward while another group was in the hall... I literally had nowhere to go and by the sound cues there was only seconds before they came in the room and the group ahead wasn't even starting to leave...
I dropped into the fetal position, started sobbing about how Jekyll killed everyone and just played the victim who was completely broken and hiding, and when they left i cried about how it wasn't safe out there (the portals all led to "in between" spaces where "The Hunter" was).
Funnily enough the guide for that group was the casting director and the actor playing Jekyll/Hyde was one of the main co-directors of the show watching through a crack in the wall going "oh shit" at seeing me still in there.
The actual official plan for that happening was to just suck it up and let it happen... nobody counted on me coming up with split second improvisation to maintain immersion...
#improv #acting #volunteering #charity #panic
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Totally beyond overwhelmed right...
Moves wildly overwhelm me in the best of times, but now I'm:
* getting over being sick, still losing sleep from coughing and occasional debilitatingly painful coughing fits
* still exhausted from recent overwhelming emotional labor a couple of weeks ago
* massive anxiety over being hyper aware of increasing threats to my safety from !the fucking government! for being trans and how it's even fucking with my ID and ability to legally drive (I literally have no valid photo id right now, and terrified that'll block me from moving in)
* next month is an election that determines whether this country continues its descent into mirroring Nazi Germany
* nevermind that sickness and anxiety kept me from attending The High Holy Days at synagogue!
* or the fact that said synagogue still has the persistent reminder of being firebombed back in 2021 and anti-semitism is only getting worse so I'm always a little afraid when attending
I just... can't... but I still have to keep moving somehow...
Jackie (aka Queen Antifa) 🌹:debian_logo::linux: likes this.
Good watch for those of you not in the US to understand how bad the country is
#lgbtqia #lgbt #trans #usa #america #texas #emergency
Trans Texans Can No Longer Change the Gender Marker on Their Drivers Licenses
Until this week, trans residents could change their gender marker with a court order or amended birth certificate.James Factora (Them.)
EinsPossum, Hass-Ära likes this.
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I don't think it's talked about enough tbh.
When my egg cracked, there was a sense of dread... because once I knew there was no going back. My life would never be safe again.
Do I regret it? Not one bit, I'm genuinely happier now, but I do miss safety...
reductress.com/post/trans-woma…
Trans Woman Would Actually Rather Be Safe Than Brave
In an uninspiring story out of Chicago, 28-year-old Shelly Deichman would actually rather be safe than lauded as brave for simply existing as a trans woman.Reductress
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Date night tonight with my girlfriend, what do y'all think? #TransEuphoria
(Sorry no image description, if someone else writes one I'll copy it, but I'm useless at describing myself)
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Shiri Bailem likes this.
If you think Harris being a cop is worse than Trump being an aspiring Hitler:
You can go fuck yourself, you're more of a problem than the Nazis - signed, a Jew
ראַף 🟣 likes this.
A friend's furbaby is suffering and needs care yesterday, please donate if you can: gofundme.com/f/help-giggles-ge…
Donate to Help Giggles Get Urgent Dental Care, organized by Sarah Dearing
As you know I’ve been saving money for giggles dental, but as prices soar and her he… Sarah Dearing needs your support for Help Giggles Get Urgent Dental Caregofundme.com
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Still processing something...
I'm recovering from the trauma of constantly being hyper-vigilant of how I might present as a threat, constantly focused on how to make others feel safe around me...
and now I've traded it for the trauma of being constantly hyper-vigilant of potential threats around me.
It sucks but honestly I prefer it to the intense sense of isolation and loneliness.
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Solidarity with your journey and hopefully dealing with your hyper vigilance and trauma issues.
Shiri Bailem likes this.
Just reaching out for suggestions, it's not often I get people converted to the fediverse but when I do I'm a bit short on suggested instances, especially in variety.
As it stands I've got my own instance, which runs Friendica. But because I'm a nerd who craves all the options at once and will sacrifice some user-friendliness for it, it's good for me not for most users.
Aside from that, I've got lgbtqia.space which is a wonderful Mastodon server I started out on in the fediverse. But obviously leaves me fumbling when helping the rare few friends who aren't in the alphabet.
I'd like suggestions of other open instances (aside from the mega instances like mastodon.social) that I can direct people to, especially of different platforms so they have a little more choice in their experience.
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Getting tired of people pretending Jews can't possibly know the difference between Holocaust and "run of the mill" genocide (both are bad, one just is much more orchestrated).
But why should I be surprised? The pajamafication of the holocaust means most people don't even understand a damn thing about it anyways.
Milquetoast :nonbinary_flag: likes this.
I'm so incredibly done with people being on a high-horse shitting on advances in AI for no other reason than to feel better about themselves.
Like if your issue is things like copyright and training data? Sure, go off, it's a philosophical argument there about rights, economy, etc. Likewise for arguments about ecological impact (it can be made reasonable there, the companies just don't want to).
But if you're just posting bullshit like "Hahaha, the language model can't do math" or "Look at how it was baited into saying something stupid" as proof that it's worthless: go fuck yourself.
Let alone the people who try to relate AI development to "NFT Bros"... NFTs literally don't do shit, AI actually has multiple proven and valid uses cases but if you think it's the same thing that just shows you have your head up your ass and refuse to look at the world around you.
All of that before getting to the fact that they have shown incredible usefulness for disability accommodations, but I guess it doesn't count if you prefer to be ableist and think we don't need or deserve accommodations?
So tired of people in general right now...
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@Lea I think you're quibbling over the term "generative" there, a non-generative version would be outputting just variables rather than raw text. Ie. non-generative analysis is just going to be "x% confident, x% aggressive, x% sympathetic..."
- analyzing prose and flagging tone or phrasing problems = like so many anti-ai people you just assume the person using it is somehow unable to read and understand the text. And frankly as I've already said this is a disability accommodation I'm a little bit pissed off at this response. We can understand these things when pointed out, we can understand whether the text it gives is trash, we're not idiots. What it does is consistently give us text that fixes our tonal issues, and we can recognize those fixes after the fact but can't reasonably do them on our own. So maybe get your head out of your ass when talking about a disability accommodation that someone has first hand experience on and has said so up front.
- summarizing reviews - again, you're just trying to throw away a point because you don't understand what "generative" or "large language model" means.
- coding assistant - and again clearly you made one half-assed attempt to make it do more than it's capable of, considered it trash, and then threw the whole thing away. I've used it plenty, I've used it to speed through refactoring a whole project to change database engines out, I've used it to speed through building UIs with a bunch of buttons. Does it create good code when I just ask it to write a whole application for me? Hell no. But it sure as hell can see me writing a list of buttons and go, "Oh, I recognize the pattern of the names I'm going to fill this in 20 more times with all variables names changed to meet the pattern".
@Lea like I said, you're attacking the definition of generative by ignoring the actual definition.
And I'm done with this conversation since all you're doing is looping back on points I've already called out. You've been an ass, just accept it and move on.
Seriously, if you're not in the US it's important to recognize how catastrophically fucked everything is. Like I actively need to flee the country bad...
youtu.be/MXQ43yyJvgs?si=sTz4zy…
Trump Is Immune
This is one of the worst SCOTUS decisions ever. 📰 Get 40% off of Ground News: https://legaleagle.link/groundnews ⚖️⚖️⚖️ Do you need a great lawyer? I can h...YouTube
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Yeah. Like, if you feel so powerless or hopeless that your impulse is to flee, why not take a chance at redirecting that energy. Point it toward a problem that needs doing.
You can do whatever you want. That's what it means to be free. You can be whoever you want to be, that's the meaning of liberty. If you don't have any ideas, come to me and I'll lend you a hand.
@Ritz-Menardi ... yeah, I'm talking about imminent threat of the loss of freedom for existing.
I'm disabled, I can't do shit, communication and education is all I can offer and I'm doing all I can there.
I'm dependent on others even for my ability to flee...
This is like Germany just before the Holocaust, telling Jews (of which I am also) to fight isn't a great idea at that time.
Disability makes everything more difficult. I get it.
Communication and education are important.
You should do what your heart tells you to do.
@Ritz-Menardi and to be clear, it's not an impulse to flee... it's complete terror because I see the writing on the wall for Hitler 2.0 and it's going to get really really bad before it gets better and if I stick around I'm very unlikely to survive.
Pikuach nefesh, my first duty is to stay alive.
I know. Keep in mind, though, that the propagandic writing-on-the-wall cuts both ways. There are many more of us, than of them.
your first duty is to stay alive. plus, what you can do, you can do from anywhere, so long as the internet remains true. alas, has it ever been? but still it's up to you, what to do. no matter where you are, you'll find friends who will need your heart, your words, your kindness, and whatever other aid you may give.
I'm trans and relatively healthy and strong. in my legs at least. so my choice is a bit different than yours, mine becomes "die now, that others might live or die later, that others might die before me" and frankly that's not a choice at all.
I'm in shock...
An anime I'm watching has a love triangle and then actually had someone say "have you considered polyamory?" (paraphrased)
Oh shit... first period.
That's what they mean by emotional!
Jackie (aka Queen Antifa) 🌹:debian_logo::linux: likes this.
I shared this 3 years ago today before my egg even cracked...
And honestly, rereading it is chilling a true. I never experienced dysphoria before transitioning, but I definitely felt that those were not my spaces or my people.
On top of that, when around other women I was incredibly self conscious... in the spaces that felt the most natural, the relationships that felt the most natural, I felt like I was intruding.
I was so intimately aware of the threat of men and because I thought I was one I was so terrified of being threatening and making the women around me feel unsafe... because doing so would mean being feared and ostracized by the people I felt most natural with.
For the longest time I thought this was maybe just because I was autistic, and even then I still couldn't understand why I felt natural around women and those socialized as women... It was a sticking point in my mind constantly because I know I wasn't socialized female and I have a bio-brother who lived through similar circumstances and didn't remotely turn out the same way.
And honestly as I finally found true family... I was low key terrified for the longest time because the people I adopted were almost all women (at least, we thought so at the time... funnily enough most turned out to be trans-masc sometime after adopting them, but that didn't change the terror...)
All this is to say we're not men who decide to become women... we're women who decide to stop pretending to be men. Who grew up being forced to pretend to be someone other than who we are, and being told that the idea of being who we are is impossible, gross, and wrong. And even after we have to live in terror of people accusing us of pretending to somehow abuse other women.
Original Tumblr Post via Archive.org
Tumblr by Opiumbugit’s infinitely more accurate to characterize a trans woman as a woman pretending to be a man than it is to say she’s a man pretending to be a woman
Reply by valkyriethunderbitch
This is such an important point, and it hits at the crucial problem that even when cis people do genuinely try to wrap their brains around trans people, they tend to have trans men and trans women entirely reversed.
When a cis man tries to imagine what it would be like to be trans, invariably that man imagines what it would be like if he “wanted to be woman,” because that’s what many people think trans women are.
Instead, he should be trying to empathize with trans men. He should be thinking about his own childhood and relationship to manhood, and then asking himself how it would have felt if he’d grown up being told he was a girl, forced to wear dresses, never recognized by other boys as a boy, and then experienced the horror of going through the wrong puberty and becoming a giant estrogen factory.
Many cis women, particularly in LGBT spaces, will fall all over themselves trying to empathize and identify with trans men, because the same transmisogyny that tells them that trans women and cis men are connected tells them that cis women and trans men are connected.
Instead, cis women should be asking themselves what it would have been like if they had never been allowed to have their womanhood acknowledged. How would it have felt to grow up being told you were a boy, not allowed to deviate from male stereotypes (often with violent repercussions if you did), always viewed by other women as an icky boy or predatory male, exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around, and had testosterone distort your body irreparably only to have everyone around you use your anatomy and appearance to forever deny your womanhood and where your best possible outcome is to transition and live your life in abject poverty fighting loneliness and dysphoria and surrounded by people who think you’re a disgusting, subhuman monster who should be locked away or put down?
If you want to worry about men pretending to be women, pay more attention to trans men. They are men who are forced to pretend to be women, and while that is immensely fucked up for them to go through, it doesn’t change the fact that they are MEN in WOMEN’S spaces, and many of them take advantage of transmisogynist ideas about gender to stay in those spaces even after coming out and transitioning. Just look at all the trans men at women’s colleges – schools that in most cases will not allow trans women.
Trans women have always been women. Trans women have always been female.
Trans men have always been men. Trans men have always been male.
A trans woman cannot be a “man pretending to be a woman” because by definition we aren’t men and never were.
Reply by thecuckoohaslanded
“exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around”
So many people have no idea how true this is. Almost no statement I have ever read has resonated with me more than this.
One of the arguments certain people (mostly terfs, but dishearteningly often well-meaning feminists who have accidentally been corrupted by terf rhetoric) make about trans women is that we experience “male privilege.” This is a muddy topic, because there are certainly some situations where being socially read as male is a convenience (it is much easier to apply for jobs pre-transition and then transition while employed than it is to apply for jobs during or after the more awkward and difficult parts of transition, as an example).
There can be benefits, here and there. But to call it privilege, especially with the term “male” attached to it, is horribly misleading.
Trans women can, in the earlier parts of our lives, EXIST in male spaces. That does not mean we belong in them. Or feel comfortable anywhere near them. Even if you look outwardly male, being in male spaces is terrifying. Even being in NEUTRAL spaces is terrifying. You are in a constant state of panic around men. And you fear rejection and ostracization from other women – the people you most empathize with and understand, whose personalities and ways of thinking most closely match your own, whose communities you desperately crave to be a part of because that’s where you belong – almost as much as you fear breathing the same air as any man you aren’t comfortably out to, including friends and family. We NEVER feel safe. And we are firsthand witnesses to all the reasons we SHOULDN’T feel safe around men. They’re horrifying. What was so frustrating about the “Locker Room Talk” scandal during the 2016 election, as a trans woman, is that you know from personal experience that it was “anywhere and everywhere outside the earshot of a woman” talk. Dozens of sports teams came forward and said no, we don’t talk like this, we would never say things like this, we would never disrespect women like this. I have never been an athlete. My only experience with locker rooms was required as a high school credit, and made me extraordinarily uncomfortable. I ASSURE you, I have heard talk like this OUTSIDE of the hypermasculine world of sports. The level of total disregard that men have for women’s most basic humanity is STAGGERING. Men don’t see women as less than human. They see women as less than ALIVE, nothing more than usable, disposable objects.
Trans women’s great “privilege” of existing “safely” in male spaces is being exposed to this world and these people up close, alone, (if in a locker room, without most of your clothes, and with all the added shame about your body that comes from that) in a state of absolute terror that ANYTHING about your personality, your mannerisms, your body language, the way you don’t quite fit in with the way they talk, will tip them off that you’re not one of them. Your LIFE depends on whether they notice. That’s not safety. That’s Russian Roulette where you don’t get the option to stop playing, and not only do you not know if or when you might get the bullet, you don’t even know how many bullets are loaded in the first place. Every single interaction with another human being is a trigger being pulled in slow motion, in overwhelming, agonizing detail as you can only wait to find out if you drew a blank.
We spend our lives pretending, often badly, to fit in with these people. Not because we have or want any god damn thing on this earth in common with them, but because the alternative – that they will know we aren’t – fills us constantly with a paralyzing, spine-chilling terror that is almost impossible to describe. Even when real benefits that do come from being read as male (again, this is usually socioeconomic factors), we are constantly, inescapably aware that all of these things come at the expense of our own authenticity. We have to lie to get them. We live in unbearable discomfort with the fact that everything good that happens to us is because other people are making these massively incorrect assumptions or judgments about the kinds of people we are. We live with the fact that everything good could be taken away the second anyone finds out we’re not what they wanted based on our appearance, because often it’s the only way we can survive at all.
Let me rephrase that last part for emphasis, because it’s integral to understanding the core of this issue, and the core of the argument that OP (and the excellent addition) wanted to make. If your takeaway is just ONE part of my addition to this post, let it be this:
Every single interaction we have with another human being is based solely on the value assigned to us based on our physical appearance, and how well we can conform to those expectations, which leaves us feeling suffocatingly, deeply uncomfortable and often terrified for our personal safety and livelihood.
Think about that before you put the words “male privilege” anywhere in a conversation about trans women.
For parts of our lives, we can exist in male spaces. But even in them, we are still always, at our core, women. Everything else is social. Everything else is acting. Trans women pretend to be men until we just can’t take it anymore, and we either live as the women we always were, or one way or another, we die. We can never really be anything other than female.
Womanhood is not the thing trans women have to fake.
#LGBT #LGBTQIA #Trans #TransFemme
Pro Trick I've Learned To Land A Hot Girlfriend: Become A Girl
#trans #TransFemme #LGBT #LGBTQIA
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Hands down the worst most bullshit thing about Friendica...
No notifications for moderation reports. Only way to know if something has been reported? Gotta manually go check the list (oh and no way to clear items from the list, or do anything with them at all...)
Few months ago I had a rude awakening to this, and then apparently it's been a minute since I last checked (I try and check every time I think of it).
Thankfully the only recent report was a remote server but eww... I hate that it took me that long to block that server.
Getting your first cat-call as a trans-femme is such a weird disorienting feeling...
It's honestly super gross... but then... gender euphoria? ... but still creepy and gross.
#HRT #TransFemme #trans #lgbtqia #lgbt
My mood has improved so damn much this past week... I don't know what caused it but I feel more alive and happy.
And that's before kissing a girl and learning I'm 3 inches shorter than I was before HRT...
#lgbt #lgbtqia #trans #TransFemme
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Fun fact: I lost 3 inches since starting HRT and am now 5'7" (that's about 170cm for you standardized folk, and around 7.5cm off)
#HRT #Trans #TransFemme #LGBT #LGBTQIA
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@Nicolai von Neudeck 🤒🤕 they do not, but as I understand it the cushions between my spinal segments shrink!
I was confused as well when I first heard about this phenomenon lol
Shiri Bailem
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