rhymingteelookatme

[rhymingteelookatme]

Art by Olga Kim

[rhymingteelookatme]

The thing about censorship is: it actually makes kids MORE likely to stumble across things that theyre not ready for.

Back before this site banned porn, it was all tagged with whatever clear label matched it. If you wanted to search for, say, bdsm, you could type that in and find exactly that. And, crucially, it meant you could filter it out, too. Meaning that people who wanted to find that content could do so with ease, and people who wanted to not find that content on their dash by surprise could also ensure that with ease.

But then tumblr banned porn thanks to pressure from the Apple App store, and ----- did porn go away? Nope. It just stopped being labelled as porn. There's still all the same raunchy content on here as there was before -- its just not tagged, or its tagged with euphemisms, or tagged with creative tags that circumvent the bans, or tagged with completely unrelated should-be-innocuous tags like "oceans" or "photography" or "flowers" or etc.

Which not only makes it harder to find, but also, more importantly, makes it harder to avoid.

Nowadays I can be scrolling my dash and get slapped suddenly in the face by a post that is decidedly not G-rated, and its because neither the OP or the person who reblogged it has tagged with anything, meaning my blocklist (which I have in place so that I'm not surprised by a raunchy gifset while I'm scrolling my dash in the work lunchroom, surrounded by colleagues) hasn't caught it and filtered it out.

And the same thing is going to happen on other platforms. If you ban porn, the outcome is never "there is no more porn" -- the outcome is just "porn is harder to find now and simultaneously harder to avoid."

This post was prompted by a random post i saw earlier today which ive since lost, but which was an advert for some """fishing gear""" that looked pretty much like a dildo. And who knows, maybe that item WAS some kind of obscure fishing gear. But it made me think of how, with the censorship and purity culture infecting every corner of the internet, it means we ARE going to wind up with sites that are selling sex toys that are labelled as innocuous everyday items.

So imagine youre a kid and you get suddenly super into fishing, and you're looking into building a christmas wish list, so you research a bunch of fishing tackle. And there, nestled amongst the lures and weights and lines and tackle boxes, is a bunch of sex toys. None of them are labelled as sex toys. Theyre labelled as miscellaneous fishing tackle. Because, unbeknownst to you, the sex toys companies -- no longer able to advertise their wares honestly -- have started labelling their dildos as fishing lures and their whips as fishing poles and their butt plugs as fishing weights. And those In The Know are aware that to purchase sex toys, you need to look up these Regular Non-sexy Products, and you'll find the raunchy products youre after.

But meanwhile, anyone who wants to find ACTUAL fishing lures and poles and weights suddenly has to contend with mislabelled sex toys showing up in their search results.

TLDR? Censoring porn never makes it go away. It just makes it go into hiding. Which, in an internet era, makes it more likely that the kids you're trying so hard to """protect""" from porn will simply stumble upon it through routes that used to be but are no longer innocuous.

[rhymingteelookatme]

Hadestown (Amsterdam)

[rhymingteelookatme]

Like to charge reblog to cast

[rhymingteelookatme]

The UK government did an investigation into the porn sites that haven't yet implemented the age verification measures and they...I shit you not, they published a list. A LIST of all the porn sites. That you can still access without having to verify your age. They made a government employee make a list of all the porn sites and check if they have age verification and then they published a list of those that don't. For all the public to read.

[rhymingteelookatme]

[rhymingteelookatme]

Schlott has taken old pay phones, modified them to make free calls, and set them up in three different towns across the county. He buys the phones secondhand from sites like eBay and Craigslist and restores them in his home workshop. With just an internet connection, these phones can make calls anywhere in the U.S. or Canada — no coins required. And Schlott covers all the operating costs himself.

When's the last time you saw a working payphone?

More of this, please.

[rhymingteelookatme]

Im not in a field that would ever use a large language model and in the areas of my life where I could use them, I enjoy the work that it would be doing for me, so why would I do that?

Is chatGPT going to mow the lawn for me? Do the dishes?

"We have created a robot that pets your cat for you." Thanks, I will not use this.

I don't understand why everyone wants me to use this thing. "It writes for you." Okay? But I already do that.

[rhymingteelookatme]

Heterosexual relationship culture is so alien to me and I don’t know if it’s the fact I’m not cishet or the fact I’m autistic but I hear so many things that make me go “Am I insane or are they?”

There’s a lot of hate on widowers and I saw a woman say “You cannot compete with a dead woman.” which is perhaps a reasonable statement to say if he’s constantly comparing you to his dead partner but that wasn’t what the post was about. And I realized “Oh my God, these people genuinely feel like they’re constantly in competition with their spouse’s exes and the ex being dead makes them feel insecure that they cannot best her.”

There’s also been an uptick in the ‘men and women cannot be ‘just’ friends’ rhetoric which I feel like is extremely dangerous and reflects the rise of fascism and sexism. Some of these stories of women feeling threatened by their husband’s female best friend have some merit and others are like “I feel angry that my husband still talks to the girl he grew up next door to and she and her wife are invited to family gatherings and included in family photos sometimes. Am I right to be suspicious?” No. No you’re not. I cannot imagine being you and living with that high level of stress and paranoia and constant torment and jealousy about your husband having a positive relationship with anyone who isn’t you.

[rhymingteelookatme]

Hey @staff why is it that reporting a blog for revealing people’s real names is not a reportable offence? Why are you allowing users to have their privacy violated by someone attempting to find and post their real names? Why have you allowed trans blogs to be deactivated for their own safety because your reporting system is fucking useless?

Unfortunately, your name isn't considered private information, and posting it isn't a violation of either the law or of our User Guidelines. If you're uncomfortable with the post, try to communicate with the person who posted it and make your feelings on it known.

It should be considered private information if the blog in question does not have permission to post someone’s name that they have not publically revealed.

It should not be up your users to communicate with someone maliciously trying to target them. If someone reports that their name is being posted, then you should treat that as a violation of privacy.

[rhymingteelookatme]

You know what's upsetting about this?

This is the third major doxxing/harassment campaign I've seen against those of us who talk about transandrophobia theory since starting to use this tag (and similar) - so roughly speaking, 2019/2020. And over the years there's some major blogs (some of them mentioned together in one post by today's doxxer) which have deactivated and been run off this site - including me at one point.

This account is a new one - I used to be one of the largest blogs talking about transandrophobia on here a few years back - and helped mod a discord server with some of the other major blog owners on here who developed transandrophobia theory. But my mental health got bad enough I quit my old account after the second harassment campaign (the so-called "transmasc blocklist").

I felt safe enough to return here like last year, but it's genuinely so sad seeing some of the most active and thoughtful contibutors get harassed off the site for the crime of believing transmascs face discrimination because of their transmasculinity. It's horrific and while it isn't deterring me, I fear it will deter others, like it did the last time.

This is systematic erasure and silencing of transmasculine people. If it is made difficult for us to speak up, we will continue to suffer in silence. This is what transandrophobes want - whether they're terfs or any other kind of transphobe. Their goal is to silence transmascs completely. We can't give in to that - we won't give in to that and they will be held accountable for harassing, doxxing and harming transmascs.

[rhymingteelookatme]

Confession: The letter “t” key on my laptop has been broken since 2024. From what my research tells me, they can’t fix individual keys on that model, and my laptop is no longer under a warranty, but it seems foolish to fork out over $900 for a new computer, so instead I’ve trained my brain to hit ctrl+v every time I want to hit “t.”

But sometimes I have to copy-paste something else besides “t,” which means I need a readily available place to copy the “t” from.

My first thought was to search “tiger” on Google, but if you can’t type the letter “t,” you just get search results about Bob Iger.

I realized words that end with “t” are easier for Google to autocomplete, so the first one I thought of was “crypt.” But wouldn’t you know, googling “cryp” takes to you to cryptocurrency results, and I REALLY don’t want my algorithm thinking I google that multiple times per week.

Then I remembered a cool place I went in London, called Cafe in the Crypt. It’s exactly what it sounds like and located below St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church. When I type in “Cafe in Cryp,” Google does indeed autocomplete it effectively! So I either keep that search result open in a tab or Google it every day.

So, that being said, if anyone works for St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church’s marketing department and has been utterly flummoxed by an IP address from Virginia that has googled their cafe hundreds of times over the past 6 months… that wasn’t a bot, that was me.

I am the Spiders Georg of Cafe in the Crypt.

Anyway, it’s a pretty cool place to check out if you’re ever in London. Just maybe not cool enough to Google it on a daily basis for months straight.

[rhymingteelookatme]

Sarah and Emily Sweetings

[rhymingteelookatme]

Things are bad and terrible and stupid but at least there's bugs and sweet fruit and queer little podcasts and the sky changes colour at dusk and dawn. I can go to a park and meet a dog. My conditioner smells like fake strawberries. My houseplants and herbs still grow, despite the weather outside. There's time for nature documentaries and solo TTRPGs and library books before bed and the birds still sing in the morning. And I still have the ability to make the rest of it just a tiny bit less bad and terrible and stupid.

[rhymingteelookatme]

complimented a cashier on her turtle pin this morning and she said "oh thanks, I am a little bit of a Turtle Person" with the carefully contained energy of Cookie Monster telling you he's mildly fond of chocolate chips

I hope she and the multiple tons of turtle merch she definitely has at home are having a wonderful day

[rhymingteelookatme]

a lot of u use words like gaslighting and psyop when u meaning lying and tricking