before it gets bad I'm just gonna tell y'all certain rich people have literally only recently noticed Open Source software availability compromises the bottom line of their proprietary investments so if you see little chickadees on this website talking about the dangers of Open Source software all of a sudden it's cuz they accidentally sipped some koolaid mixed up by the far right yacht people to fuck with peoples software sovereignty and right to repair, modify, and redistribute robust codebases that become a problem when 30% of your portfolio is in, oh, say, adobe or openai.

This is your unfriendly neighborhood computer fucker telling you not to fall for it and to demand your right to digital sovereignty rather than trusting companies to make correct choices about what to do with the parts of your life they would very much like to have in the cloud to continue improving their products.

thought you all should know that neopets is currently experiencing a sitewide bug that prevents anyone from doing nearly anything on the site because it says that none of us have gender

Magical girl transformation where I look exactly the same by the end except my posture and speech are different and I have to be reminded of several details on the conversation we just had

i really believe that discussing the character with someone who shares ur interpretation is the closest u can get to modern day philosophy. we are like plato and aristotle but talking about a fictional guys trauma

this is ryan hall. him and his team do an amazing job covering severe weather across the united states. this is a livestream for the storms happening right now, april 2, 2025. if you are in the path of severe weather today, be prepared and stay safe!

glad this post reached you then! this channel's severe weather coverage has no commercials and no interruptions, but it does have a whole lot of mispronounced place names. one of my favorite parts of his coverage is how he goes out of his way to name places of interest in relation to where the storms are, like schools and hospitals, so people have an even better idea of where and when to shelter.

one more thing worth mentioning: this team is often able to identify tornadoes before official tornado warnings get issued. those few extra minutes can be life or death.

Just one for today.

Character belongs to @robin-writes-and-such

Cherry blossoms

*aborted little brother voice* it would be my turn on the xbox...if i existed...

As of posting, it has never been outright stated in the game that Mizuki is transgender, although the fact can be inferred from several hints in the story, mainly from how their classmates act around them. Outside of the story, there are several visual codes that suggest or even confirm the fact that Mizuki is trans.

A lot of color coding and symbolism is used to suggest that Mizuki is transgender, perhaps the most obvious example being their Fragment SEKAI, which uses the same color palette as the transgender pride flag. You can read more about that in this post.

Both the 2D and 3D MVs for IDSMILE, Mizuki's first commissioned song, switch betwen a pink (typically feminine) and blue (typically masculine) color palette, but are pink for the vast majority of the song. In the 2DMV, the background changes to blue for the first part of the final chorus, before returining to pink before the end of the song.

In the 3DMV, the lighting changes to blue during the instrumental, then shifts between pink and blue during the bridge, and then remains as pink for the final chorus.

A similar use of lighting can be seen in Mizuki's trained The One Who Gave Me Courage 4*. Mizuki's room is lit in blue, with pink light filtering in through the window, which Mizuki is leaning towards.

This point was submitted by @glitter-and-strangle-hugs

And if you look closely at Mizuki's Nightcord icon, you'll notice that it uses the same blue, white & pink color palette as the trans pride flag.

This point was via a reply from @misty-is-a-dragon

All of the symbolism and color-coding aside, the fact that Mizuki is transgender is actually confirmed by their middle school appearance. When they were in middle school, Mizuki had a typically masculine haircut and wore more masculine clothes. They also wore Kamiyama's male uniform, indicated by the tie used, the side of the blazer that the buttons are on, and the fact that they are wearing trousers.

You might also notice that in their middle school bedroom, they have a cloth covering their mirror, but in high school the cloth is folded over and the mirror is visible. This could be linked to their appearance at both points in time, and Mizuki being more comfortable with their feminine presentation.

A final, song-based example of Mizuki’s trans coding is that they (alongside Mafuyu) covered Villain, a song with a transgender narrator. Mizuki also has a solo Another Vocal of the cover, which you can listen to in the video above.

The song IDSMILE also adds to the case, since the lyrics describe Mizuki’s situation of being afraid to tell people their secret [about their gender identity] and distancing themself from their friends by keeping it hidden.

(All TLs in this post are from Meltdown on YT)

The Mizuki centric event Next to the Unchanging Warmth provides even more evidence to support this fact. There are several flashbacks to Mizuki's childhood during the story, in which we see them becoming conflicted over whether they should dress in cute (and girly) clothes like they enjoy or stop being interest in these things because of how the people around her perceive her.

A particularly notable scene is in chapter 3, where we see a younger Mizuki going to elementary school wearing the frilly blouse that her sister made for her (seen in her untrained Encouraged By Your Kindness 4* and child Live2D model). When Mizuki's classmates see their clothes, they agree that they're cute, but question why Mizuki would wear [typically girly] clothes and call them weird. Yuuki later reassures them that their interests and fashion choices aren't weird, and that they should hold on to the things they like even if other people aren't supportive.

As mentioned in a fact earlier this month, the 2DMV for Villain - a song Mizuki (and Mafuyu) covered that has a transgender narrator - was intentionally designed to reflect the struggles faced by minority groups. While this reflects the message of the original song, these choices being made when Mizuki was one of the singers, and even Mizuki being picked to cover it in the first place, certainly supports the idea of her being trans.

It's also worth pointing out an extra bit of choreography for Villain, that can't be seen in the 3DMV. During the "I'm not a mutant; I'm just me whether that's X or Y" line, Mafuyu draws an X shape with her fingers, and then makes a Y shape with her arms over the correct letters, but live performances reveal that Mizuki does the opposite during this part.

The bow Kanade is holding in her A Certain Forgotten Thing 2* card, available in the Where Does The Path Of Thorns Go? event exchange, has blue and pink stripes, once again echoing the trans flag. The bow is the same as the one from Mizuki's Hide Crinoline outfit, shown multiple times ealier in this post (Villain 3DMV/IDSMILE outfit).

While Mizuki is not confirmed as a trans girl in the aforementioned event, some of her classmates confront Ena and ask if "[she's] a guy too". Mizuki's untrained shows her walking in on this scene, and she runs away immediately after. The classmates later imply Mizuki identifies as female, telling Ena that they were only joking before and believed Ena is "a real girl [unlike Mizuki]". While Mizuki's gender remains listed as ?, it is explicitly clear that she is a transgender woman.

Mizuki Akiyama is canonically transgender as of October 12, 2024.

I'm, above all else, a tangentgirl. always saying shit like "sidenote," "oh also," "by the way,"

I'd just like to clarify some things about Senator Cory Booker's marathon Senate speech in protest of the present administration and everything they are doing to the American people.

Senator Booker was NOT allowed to sit down, eat, or use the bathroom during his speech. Sitting or leaving the room to use the bathroom would be considered yielding the floor. Eating would have interfered with his speaking and the person who has the senate floor must continue to speak, except when listening to questions that they will then answer.

He only took occasional sips of water.

The person who previously held the record for longest speech on the Senate floor did have bathroom breaks and also did things like read from the encyclopedia.

Senator Booker did not do that. His speech was to point out the damage that this administration is doing and he stayed on that subject.

Senator Booker's speech did reach many people. It wasn't a silly stunt that was done so that he could take the record for longest speech. He wanted to show the country that democrats will do something to bring attention to the problems we are facing. That democrats are listening to them.

Senator Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and 4 minutes to "make good trouble."

also like, a Black man breaking Strom Thurmond's record is absolutely *chef's kiss*

for those who are too young to know about Strom, he was literally a white supremacist

He trained himself to give this speech by practicing and then implementing limits on food and water intake leading up to this. He cut out food for days, then cut out water the day before.

He then went to do an appearance on Maddow after yielding.

It’s fools day…

@fruutbaag