@bisexualbaker / bisexualbaker.tumblr.com
[Image description: text: "April Fools' Day is cancelled this year because no made up prank could match the Unbelievable shit show going on in the world right now." End description]
Until I read this, I hadn't even noticed that Tumblr doesn't have any special blogging games for today (like they did last year).
HE BROKE THE RECORD
Senator Cory Booker just broke the all-time record for the longest Senate floor speech, speaking for over 24 hours without a pause (no food, no bathroom breaks, only water to drink) as a protest against Trump and Musk and what they're doing.
The previous record was set in 1957, when Strom Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes protesting the Civil Rights Act.
Senator Booker has blown past that record, currently at 25 hours and still speaking as of 8 pm local time. Respect.
okay but there is something disquieting about this urge to cast fan writers as altruists. they give us all this for free!! well, no.
they’re sharing
it’s a key difference in perception. fic isn’t given. it’s shared. it’s part of a fandom community— in which readers are also an integral part.
it’s probably inevitable mission creep from the increasingly transactional nature of the internet and fandom-as-consumerism, which was always gonna happen after corps worked out how much bank there is to make from those weirdo fan people
but like. fandom is sharing. i think we’ve lost that somewhere.
Fandom encompasses a whole lot more than the writing and reading of fanfic, or even the creating and consuming of fanworks in general.
First and foremost, fandom is community. That's WHY fandom is sharing.
It happens that we, as a community, have many hobbies, some of which produce things which our fellows may then further enjoy - writing, art, crafts, costumes, games, music, videos, etc. - but the soul of fandom isn't the fanworks, per se, it's the gathering around the thing we're all fans of.
We, the writers, the artists, the costumers, the filkers, the con-runners, are not doing this for you.
Bonus if you tell me if you're right or left handed
So in case anyone wanted more evidence of how government suppression of free speech is spreading globally, in the UK on Thursday evening (March 27th), twenty police officers broke into Westminster Quaker Meeting House in London and arrested six members of the group Youth Demand who met to discuss concerns about the climate and Gaza. The charge was apparently conspiracy to commit a public nuisance - this raid is a direct result of law changes in 2022 and 2023 designed to dramatically restrict people's ability to plan and carry out protests. In addition to breaking into the Meeting House, there have apparently been twelve related house raids and three other arrests.
This is horrifying. It is happening under an allegedly left wing government (our current PM Starmer is Labour, but that name doesn't really mean anything under his government). There is no harm caused in meeting to discuss ways to challenge the government, except to the government itself. Yet apparently, a simple meeting is enough to justify police armed with tasers and more than a dozen raids.
We are allowed to believe that change is necessary. We are allowed to discuss ways to make change happen - and across history, the most significant social changes have only been made possible thanks to protest.
Screw Labour and the UK establishment.
I want to add some more context about why this is so terrifying. The last time a Quaker Meeting House was violated like this in the UK was in the 1600s, to disrupt people who were exercising their right to freedom of religion. The state of free speech in the UK is apparently in a worse position than it has been for centuries - and certainly within living memory.
Our Meeting Houses are places of worship. They are places of peace and contemplation and it is so utterly disrespectful to break down our doors to stop people talking to each other. And I only know about this because I'm a Quaker myself, and I think it should be spread across the UK so people know how the state is actively working ageist us.
Please share this if you can.
This one was really perplexing... First off, it is LONG. Far above the usual ~4000 word count of a tingler. Secondly, it isn't sexy at all? Third, it diverges pretty far from the sort of plots I have come to expect in tinglers.
Tinglers have a sort of format, and I've read a lot of them. I usually have a good idea of what to expect from the general shape of the story, and the surprises are in the details. This one, though? I had no idea what was going to happen next an any point. When the demon started appearing, I was sure she was going to be a living object, a manifestation of some challenging feelings the protagonist was going through that would end up not being as frightening as she first appeared. Sorry if this is a spoiler but: they never pound it out! There isn't any romance between them at all, most of what happens between them is actually really frightening!
Eventually I came to the realization that this is a story in the vein of "Not Pounded By Twiddor Checkmarks Because I Blocked Every Person Who Has One, Despite Elon Mork Standing Outside My House In The Middle Of The Night Crying And Begging Me To Join Twiddor Blue", with a focus on suspense and social commentary. And this story is really good for what it is! I just wish Dr. Tingle put "Not Pounded" in the title to avoid confusion.
It's time to finally to announce a secret I've been keeping for weeks: the addition of an incredibly elusive animal to the repository collection!
Meet the basselope: a rare species that was thought to be extinct until a last surviving individual was rediscovered in 1986. Thanks to some incredible breeding successes in the subsequent years, the basselope population rebounded successfully. Now found in all continents but Antartica, modern basselopes have proven to be a highly adaptable species, and populations in different regions display a wide range of phenotypic variability.
Meet.... the basselope!
Basselope, while not domesticated, regularly choose to den in human homes. The North American population has a particular fondness for couches.
The "jungle" phenotype has lost their antlers over time, likely due to ease of movement through dense plants and vines. They are known for their habit of swinging their ears through the air as they move: while the origin of this behavior is unknown, it's theorized this adaptation may be both a form of enhanced thermoregulation and a way of communicating with conspecifics.
One isolated population of basselope has begun to shed their antlers seasonally, and they have begun a new annual tradition of posing against a backdrop of their previous year's accomplishments.
One of the most elusive morphs is the "arctic" basselope. Despite sharing a range with other basselope populations - which is not all that far north - they're known for developing a strikingly colored and oddly jingly winter coat. The genes responsible for this seasonal color expression are as of yet unknown.
Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission from the basselopes to use these and all photos of them in the repository as references, including for works that will/may be sold.
The Animal Photo Reference Repository is an independent, permanently open-access project and funded entirely by donations, which allows me the creative freedom to have way, way too much fun on April 1st.
[Images: Adorable basset hounds, most wearing fake cloth antlers, some without, one posing under a pair of deer or elk antlers, and the last two wearing Christmas reindeer antlers.]
Concept: cursed blade rehabilitation center. Destroying a sentient weapon is expensive and highly unethical, so adventurers bring them to the center where highly trained staff can care for them and eventually find them forever homes. It turns out most cursed weapons are products of trauma and are not strictly evil themselves. Some blades turn out to be fiercely protective companions. Others don't even want to be weapons at all, finding joy in simple work like blacksmithing or farming. Most blades just need to be loved.
A pack of bandits descend upon a seemingly undefended town. But the blacksmith's hammer, the farmer's scythe, the woodsman's axe, they have not forgotten what they once were, and they *will* defend the town that they have come to love.
This sweet girl has been with us for seven seasons. She was forged in the heart of a volcano and would be ideal for anyone with a preexisting fire affinity (she's a cuddler and is guaranteed to keep you warm in winter). She still loves burning, but it turns out you can only reduce the world to ash once. She would be perfectly suited for forest management that regularly requires controlled burns.
This weary old soul has grown tired of bloodshed and would much rather spend his days as an ominous decoration in a tavern or common room, a perfect fit for an adventurer looking to leave their dungeon crawling days behind. He likes peoplewatching with his single glowing eye, preferably from high, prominent locations with views of entrances and exits.
Dark king Grütmore’s edge of annihilation consumed 10,000 souls in the first era, and as it turns out, statistically a lot of those souls heard stories that never got written down. It works in a library now.
The throngler, however, is just irrevocably fucked up. We put it in a stone in a forest and hoped nobody ever finds it
Every human being who's ever had to deal with menstruation related gastrointestinal upsets should be entitled to financial compensation, by the way.
heyyyy i'm going to tell you guys something i didn't know
sometimes if you have endometriosis and it mostly has decided to wrap itself around your intestines
your periods themselves and your uterus feel relatively normal but your menstruation-related gastrointestinal upset gets HORRIFIC. just incredibly awful and painful. and you think this is normal (and maybe so do your doctors) because it's not PERIOD pain
and then years later you're having surgery and the surgeon goes OH HOLY FUCK at your insides because you had endometriosis all this time
fun facts!
unrelatedly my menstruation-related gastrointestinal upset is about 20% of what it was this time last year. no reason.
thinking again about vampirism as disability
what if you slept all day and woke at night, lonely and frustrated. what if you couldn't go to social events, or even mundane public spaces like stores. what if you couldn't see the sun. what if you couldn't go to the pool, or the beach, or the creek. what if you couldn't eat what everyone else is eating. what if you couldn't eat at all. what if your basic needs came at the cost of your loved ones' quality of life. what if you became agitated, confused, maybe even violent if your needs weren't met. what if people blamed your behavior on demons, or worse, your own inherent evil. what if people saw you as a threat to your own community. what if the default response to your suffering was either indifference or violence. what if people thought you were better off dead, that you no longer count as human, that they're doing you a favor by letting you disappear. what if people assumed you must somehow deserve all of this. what about that.
I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.
So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.
Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.
This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.
Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.
And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.
Again, look into backing up your shit and switching to Linux Mint or Ubuntu to get away from Microsoft doing this shit.
there are multiple options here depending on how comfortable you are digging into your computer's registry. You can either simply disable it surface level through settings or excise it entirely from the system registry
reblogging again as a cautionary tale to please PLEASE fucking make a system restore point before you do anything. i consider myself tech savvy and still nearly bricked my computer. and make sure you know how to access safe mode
I implore you to shop second hand. If hunting for treasures in a physical location isn’t your idea of a good time, you can try these online/app based ways to buy second hand (and re-home your unwanted clothes):
There are also browser extensions like Beni that will help you find the same or similar garments on the second hand market when browsing an online retailers website.
And of course, when you do occasionally buy new, use the wealth of online information to vet a brand’s sustainability and workers rights practices.
https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/ebot_easy_being_green_eu_sustainability_textiles.pdf
What, on the internet specifically? Because I was writing fanfics by hand and swapping pages with my friends back in the late 90s.
for those who live in the US, a reminder to please please vote blue in all the special elections on Tuesday April 1st. Get your friends and family to vote blue as well
Update: especially if you live in Florida and Wisconsin, please vote blue!
And vote for real, too! An election is no place for an April Fool's Day joke.
