@AnarchoNinaWrites My apocalyptic view of climate change under capitalism can be captured in a single image: thousands of miles of international borders fortified with automatic machine gun nests, slaughtering endless human waves of desperate and starving climate/famine refugees. It's just one of the many genocidal horrors we'll experience as global population contracts by more than half. I don't know anyone offline (plus damned few on) I can say this to without getting the "you're crazy" look.
Fuming mildly after seeing a personal anecdote designed to make men like me more comfortable with the notion of seeking emergency medical care in ambiguous situations that might be, but probably aren't, a heart attack. "Just go to the nearest ER and get checked out, it's the wise and smart thing to do, your wife will love you for your commitment to staying alive for her!"
It's also a quick way to incur more debt in an afternoon than some of us make in a year. Not such an easy decision to make.
@AnarchoNinaWrites I have been framing this a tiny bit differently, but using the same climate apocalypse lens. If we aren't going to make a multigenerational maximum all-shoulders-to-the-wheel effort to halt and survive climate apocalypse (and we aren't) then we are going to lose billions over just a few decades. The accompanying social upheaval is UNIMAGINABLE. But the reengineering of fascism is (as I have been thinking of it) the oligarchy's plan to survive all that in style and stay on top.
I assume that people who need to know this would already know it, but I am not such a person and did not know it, so I will pass this on from a correspondent who wishes to remain nameless: There's a FOSS menstrual cycle and fertility tracking app named "drip." created by feminist female developers with privacy at its foundation. I'm not qualified to opine about its safety or security but developers say everything stays on your device: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.drip/
I *SO VERY BADLY* wanted to make a reply joke about unlocked knotting ability and access to a database of lonely werewolf smut readers being among the Wolf Plus pro features, but that's just NOT fair to drop, even with CW, into the replies of an unsuspecting civilian who doesn't have the least hint in their bio that they might react well to smutty references to highly smutty werewolf fiction.
@Alkaris I'm working up a blog post on this right now but here's a side-by-side graphic I just put together of the adult content policy two days ago versus today.
My feed's been full of pornocalypse lately. I went back to look at Matt Mullenweg's "Why "Go Nuts, Show Nuts" Doesn’t Work in 2022" that he wrote to explain why the ballyhooed "Tumblr porn unbanning" was a search-invisibility nothingburger. Well, guess what you see if you follow that link today? "You need to be on Tumblr to see this."
Fuck that. It needs to be on the open web for research and commentary purposes:
"The squeeze on commercial erotic expression continues. Until we find a way to break the moralistic chokehold of the credit card companies, it’s not going to get better. The pornocalypse comes for us all."
Today the pornocalypse came for Gumroad, which has been a platform where a lot of erotica and fetish artists could sell their stuff. As of today, all "sexually explicit" material is unwelcome there. A few hasty details, and a side-by-side graphic showing the adult content policy changes in the last 48 hours, are to be found in my ErosBlog post where I document this sort of thing:
Last night I was sitting around playing Cards Against Humanity with some disabled elders of the Muskogee Creek Nation. You know, as one does.
They started swapping stories about being refused financial services (money orders, bill paying, check cashing) at bank branches and big box stores because (they were told) facial recognition flagged them as known scammers.
I told them software like that is notorious for being racist, in an "all brown people look alike" kind of way. They had not known.
It turns out that a surprising number of unfamiliar phrases are literally unreadable to someone who lacks cultural context. One older gentleman saw "tentacle porn", read it aloud as "testicle porn", then grimaced, looked again more closely, and carefully SOUNDED IT OUT, again incorrectly, as "Testicle porn." He knew something was wrong with his reading but that wasn't enough to let him see the actual words.
This man has a master's degree and his vision is good enough to do finely detailed metalwork with a laser cutter. It wasn't a vision or a literacy problem. His brain simply would not accept as proper input a phrase that didn't match anything in its conceptual database ... or so it seemed from across the table.
What kind of stuff was I posting on #ErosBlog twenty years ago? On a whim, I went back and paged through the February 2004 posts. They're pretty fluffy, for the most part, but I found half a dozen posts still worth mentioning. I think I'll do a little thread.
Violet Blue (@violetblue) had a #blowjob#howto book out and was getting bad reviews (WTF?) from pissed-off religionists on Amazon. Her epic #rant was memorable and worth excerpting:
"Why the hell are Christians reading my fellatio book, and even stranger, what unholy ghost possesses them to write bad reviews about it on Amazon?"
@maggiejk@AnthonyJK I'm not asking for champagne, or even for a mocha, but would a glass of yesterday's weak lukewarm unsweet iced tea be entirely out of the question?