hallowsheep

[hallowsheep]

wuts that a friggin meteor

[hallowsheep]

(ko-fi commission from the absolute goat @/glcticbaseballr on twitter) "Okay."

[hallowsheep]

I have been playing bg3 a LOT lately

Mostly just designing my Tav, but I've played through a portion of act 1 and I must say... I am quite fond of Gale

He's really sweet and easy to talk to. Also he's made me laugh more than a few times. He's silly and loves attention, and I have absolutely no problem with listening to him ramble on and on about meaningless things

[hallowsheep]

If you're ever struggling to grasp Mydei's character again, please allow me to point you to this ^

His soul splits into these 5 different versions of himself; I personally believe these are core traits of his character.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, there is a difference between violence for the sake of violence and violence for the sake of protection. Mydei is a perfect example of the latter!

[hallowsheep]

LISTENING TO DANG BY RKS IS FREE THERAPY BTW

[hallowsheep]

Rainbow Kitten Surprise - LOL

Hello operator, can I call you later? You know shit's been crazy 'round here

[hallowsheep]

I jsut stuffed my face with spring rolls and now I feel like a fat seal :(

[hallowsheep]

✧°˖────———- ・・・・・ . ☽ ‧₊˚ ···╮

Did you guys see Iron-mouse’s new model? ૮ . . ྀིა⁩ I drew this in this time of burnout, watching youtube and hearing everything about VShojo shutting down. Fuck Vshojo, and support the immune-deficiency foundation. 𐙚⋆°｡⋆♡

╰┈ ‧₊˚ ☾. ⋅ ・・・・———-────°˖✧

[hallowsheep]

How To Find Out What A Bill Really Does

In response to/in support of @lizardsfromspace's post debunking the false post circulating to the tune of some tens of thousands of notes about the Fair Access to Banking Act, which you may have heard of erroneously as "protecting explicit and queer content from being excluded from transactions by major credit card companies", but is in fact about undoing progressive legislation to the financial benefit of the gun and fossil fuel industry.

After getting a request to make a post about where and how people can find more information about how to debunk claims like this, including this one, I decided to try my best to make one. If you have additional resources PLEASE feel free to add them.

So - the basics of fact-checking are to asks the same questions journalists typically do. WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, HOW. I'll be using this bill as an example.

WHAT is the substance of the information itself?

The OP links to the text of the bill. READ THE TEXT OF THE BILL. This is the absolute first step, and also every reblog of the post debunking it was people saying "So, hey, I read the bill text and it doesn't sound like it's doing what you said it's doing, in fact it looks conservative".

Look for non-tumblr reporting on it; if you aren't sure whether a source has right wing bias you can use Media Bias / Fact Check to gauge both political slant AND general factual reliability (remember, a progressive news source doesn not necessarily = a factual one!)

WHO is promoting this information?

Check your social media post before reblogging, first of all! OP doesn't seem to be conservative, but if you click on the blogs of the people adding onto the most popular version of the post, you'll quickly see that most are Trump supporters, which should give you pause, as should the rebloggers loudly talking about how this will PROTECT OUR SACRED SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS, whose politics are laid out right there. If that makes you go, "Huh?", that's a good reason to pause and look further, instead of assuming "Well, a stopped clock is right twice a day and moving on".

Look at who introduced the bill. In this case, it's Republican senator Kevin Cramer, who explains the bill's purpose clearly on his website. You will be able to see the Bill's author in the text of the bill.

Look at who co-sponsors and endorses it. In this case, Sen. Cramer has helpfully provided a list right on the same website. The list of organizations is basically a list of red flags (being mainly big polluters, gun rights groups and crypto, with zero references to supporting free speech, sex work or queer content as claimed by OP):

The Fair Access to Banking Act is endorsed by several organizations, including the National Shooting Sports Foundation, National Rifle Association, North Dakota Petroleum Council, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, The Digital Chamber, Blockchain Association, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Online Lenders Alliance, Day 1 Alliance, GEO Group, Lignite Energy Council, National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, National Mining Association, CoreCivic, and the National ATM Council.

It also has a list of dozens of other politicians who endorse it. Every single one is a Republican. Zero Democrats endorse it.

In a case where there is not another post to link to this stuff, here is the process for finding all of this information:

This is Congress's official website on where to find the full text of diferent kinds of bills: https://www.congress.gov/help/legislation-text. It will include the name of the official who introduced it. Here is their main page: https://www.congress.gov/

Here are the two websites for records of Senate and House Votes: You can look up bills by name, number, and session and see who voted for what when by clicking on the links to the current House and Senate sessions and entering a bill's title, number or even just a key word on the voting topic—so you can see how they've voted in the past.

Here are the lists of official websites of congresspeople and senators to check who they are and what they're doing, because, again, they will usually tell you.

https://clerk.house.gov/Members#MemberProfiles

WHY is this being promoted the way it is?

This is worth thinking through, and the answers to the first few questions will help to give you a sense of the goals of this legislation. Once again Senator Cramer is helping us out here, by announcing his goals openly!

"In recent years, prominent American banks have engaged in a discriminatory practice, referred to as debanking. Banks and financial institutions use their economic standing to categorically exclude law-abiding, legal industries by refusing to lend or provide services to them... This includes industries such as firearms, ammunition, crypto, federal prison contractors, as well as energy producers... When progressives failed at banning these entire industries, what they did instead is they turned to weaponizing banks as sort of a backdoor to carry out their activist goals..."

WHERE and WHEN is an issue being raised?

In this case, it's a bit confusing, which is why I left it for last; the overlap of Steam and Itch.io deleting a bunch of content over credit card provider access makes it seem like this bill is connected. This is, I think, the biggest reason why the post took off: because it could be linked to something else that users had seen, cared about, and want a solution to. Unfortunately OP doesn't seem to have looked further than that before hitting "post", nor did some others before calling their reps.

However, there are other cases in which where and when can provide extremely vital context for a measure.

For example, you'd think that measures which claim to "prevent religious discrimination" would be to the benefit of religious minorities, because preventing religious discrimination is something which is vitally necessary in a time of escalating hate crimes and social ostracism against many groups! However, under Trump, "religious discrimination" often means specifically focusing on so-called 'anti-Christian bias'. So the WHERE (coming from the Federal Government) and WHEN (a time when the government is controlled by people who routinely discriminate against religious minorities) can help flag that, hey, this thing that sounds good in theory might not actually be as good as it looks on the surface. This is one way of combatting the weasely, vague language this kind of bill sometimes uses.

WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?

@cardassiangoodreads rightly suggested looking at resources like FiveCalls which cover a lot of important progressive bills, to check if it appears there (they have topics covering censorship, etc) and suggests calls to legislators.

[hallowsheep]

Alright, I'm saying this not out of a place of personal interest or w/e because I am like staunchly an anti pr*ship individual, but with everything going on rn with censorship and whatnot I think people are really missing the point of what the fuck people are upset over;

Censorship is bad, even censorship of the shit you do not like. Even if LGBTQIA+ content weren't affected by what is occurring with Collective Shout and censorship efforts in the UK, we would still have to protest. We would still have to fight. Even if it ONLY targeted the media you did not like or agree with, you would still be expected to take action, and the reason why is very simple.

If you let payment processors dictate what content is okay for you to spend your own fucking money on, they will keep. Moving. The goal posts. First it is content you don't personally like, but then what? After the fetish content, after the hardcore kink content, what then? Then it's content with disabled characters, then it's content about childhood trauma, then it's content with a side character that has they/them pronouns, then it's content with non white characters in it.

Censorship will come after you, too, if you do not help fight it now. It will, because you are, in fact, the big scary other that is on the list of things that go against conservative values. If it isn't you, it's your friends. It's your family. It's your neighbor. Censorship WILL hurt people you care about, and it will hurt people like you, eventually, so you need to fight it now.

[hallowsheep]

I am constantly hurt by the callousness with which people dismiss the harm of restricting adult content and porn, only concerned about the knock-on effects for queer people and radical political groups. Sex workers ourselves matter just as much as non sex working queer people and leftists.

We are not canaries in the coal mine whose deaths you can dismiss while you frame groups you actually care about as the sole human casualties of these policies. I need you to care that laws like the Online Safety Act lead sex workers to have to return to abusive third parties to find clients or to work in brothels we hate or to such poverty that we starve. I need you to care about payment processors refusing to pay out for adult content because it means sex workers cannot rely on online work when selling sex in-person becomes too much for our bodies or too risky.

Please care about sex workers' suffering, rather than only the fact your favourite queer game was de-listed from itch.io and that you have to use a VPN to access adult subreddits without giving your ID now.

[hallowsheep]

I Got Caught in the Itch Shadowban :/

I did finally get the chance to check and see if my adult books are caught in the shadowban. They are. When I search for On Love by name, it does not show up, but when I search for my other, non nsfw comics, they do show up. So if anyone wants to check out my weird horror collection before Itch nukes it, here it is. There's gory lesbian monsterfucking. <3

[hallowsheep]

Okay I just want to give a bit of a personal update on the itch situation, I've delisted my books since my whole account is still shadowbanned. I have over $250 stuck with them for the time being, so we'll see if I ever get paid that or not. It mostly came from my latest release which is a taboo book, so they might not let me have it since it suddenly doesn't comply with their new TOS.

In better news, my payhip storefront is all set, I have my entire catalogue switched over to there and I'm working on putting my taboo books on smashwords as well! I've definitely learned my lesson on not having my eggs in enough baskets, so I'm going to try to have them in more places going forwards. As always, my books that comply with Amazon's TOS are available there in both ebook and paperback.

You can find everything linked in my carrd!

Thank you everyone for helping spread the word about itchio and i hope that the indie author community can recover from this!

[hallowsheep]

Tens of thousands of notes on a post claiming a bill introduced by the Republicans will make credit card companies support NSFW content, and only a handful going "hey maybe don't support this".

Let's look into how the bill is being reported elsewhere - in fact, from the Senator who introduced the Senate version of the Fair Access to Banking Act

"In recent years, prominent American banks have engaged in a discriminatory practice, referred to as debanking. Banks and financial institutions use their economic standing to categorically exclude law-abiding, legal industries by refusing to lend or provide services to them."

Hmm. What industries could he mean?

"This includes industries such as firearms, ammunition, crypto, federal prison contractors, as well as energy producers."

Wow. Who could've guessed that's what he meant

“When progressives failed at banning these entire industries, what they did instead is they turned to weaponizing banks as sort of a backdoor to carry out their activist goals..."

So it is, in fact, a bill around trying to stop left-wing activists from, say, going after oil and gas companies or private prisons or the arms industry

But - surely it would include NSFW bans too, right? It would overturn them, right? If you read the text of the bill, which is deliberately vague as you'd expect, it explicitly allows banks to deny payment based on "quantitative, impartial risk-based standards" - it only bans it for "political" or "reputational risk" considerations. And claims that the adult media industry is "high risk" is why payment processors drop it

But let's see who supports it!

"The Fair Access to Banking Act is endorsed by several organizations, including the National Shooting Sports Foundation, National Rifle Association, North Dakota Petroleum Council, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, The Digital Chamber, Blockchain Association, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Online Lenders Alliance, Day 1 Alliance, GEO Group, Lignite Energy Council, National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, National Mining Association, CoreCivic, and the National ATM Council."

Private prison companies, fossil fuel companies, blockchain companies, and the NRA. But surely...? SURELY a bill we're explicitly told again and again is about preventing left-wing activism against private industry, that's co-sponsored by fucking Lindsey Graham, and that certainly seems to include a carve-out specifically to let payment processors continue to deny adult content, but not deny conservative political causes...would secretly be pro-NSFW content?

This bill is all over the internet now, with viral pleas to GET IT PASSED and shutdowns of any criticism of a bill whose real intent is extremely overt. All of this is a simple search away and straight from the horse's mouth, and nobody wants to do even that modicum of research because they would prefer to take someone's word for it that a magic panacea is just a few phone calls away. If you make phone calls asking for this to pass, you're being played: tricked into supporting a bill crafted by the people leading the moral panic that harassed Itch into oblivion that would do nothing to help that, but that would ban any activism against payments for destructive fossil fuel extraction or gun lobbying. The guy who made it just told everyone that's what it's for! Does no one care to look? To read the bill? You can be the one to read it and say it's bad (being the only person to actually read an odious bill is called "Russ Feingold-ing")

Looking up the talk about this bill one theme I saw a lot was people dismissing anyone pointing out a Republican introduced it by saying "I don't care who introduced it! AS LONG AS SOMEBODY DOES SOMETHING!!!!" But you know what? If you saw that a Republican introduced the bill, and your reaction was to go "wow, so a Republican introduced a bill to protect adult content?" without even a pang of skepticism...I have no words tbh

[hallowsheep]

How To Find Out What A Bill Really Does

In response to/in support of @lizardsfromspace's post debunking the false post circulating to the tune of some tens of thousands of notes about the Fair Access to Banking Act, which you may have heard of erroneously as "protecting explicit and queer content from being excluded from transactions by major credit card companies", but is in fact about undoing progressive legislation to the financial benefit of the gun and fossil fuel industry.

After getting a request to make a post about where and how people can find more information about how to debunk claims like this, including this one, I decided to try my best to make one. If you have additional resources PLEASE feel free to add them.

So - the basics of fact-checking are to asks the same questions journalists typically do. WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, HOW. I'll be using this bill as an example.

WHAT is the substance of the information itself?

The OP links to the text of the bill. READ THE TEXT OF THE BILL. This is the absolute first step, and also every reblog of the post debunking it was people saying "So, hey, I read the bill text and it doesn't sound like it's doing what you said it's doing, in fact it looks conservative".

Look for non-tumblr reporting on it; if you aren't sure whether a source has right wing bias you can use Media Bias / Fact Check to gauge both political slant AND general factual reliability (remember, a progressive news source doesn not necessarily = a factual one!)

WHO is promoting this information?

Check your social media post before reblogging, first of all! OP doesn't seem to be conservative, but if you click on the blogs of the people adding onto the most popular version of the post, you'll quickly see that most are Trump supporters, which should give you pause, as should the rebloggers loudly talking about how this will PROTECT OUR SACRED SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS, whose politics are laid out right there. If that makes you go, "Huh?", that's a good reason to pause and look further, instead of assuming "Well, a stopped clock is right twice a day and moving on".

Look at who introduced the bill. In this case, it's Republican senator Kevin Cramer, who explains the bill's purpose clearly on his website. You will be able to see the Bill's author in the text of the bill.

Look at who co-sponsors and endorses it. In this case, Sen. Cramer has helpfully provided a list right on the same website. The list of organizations is basically a list of red flags (being mainly big polluters, gun rights groups and crypto, with zero references to supporting free speech, sex work or queer content as claimed by OP):

The Fair Access to Banking Act is endorsed by several organizations, including the National Shooting Sports Foundation, National Rifle Association, North Dakota Petroleum Council, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, The Digital Chamber, Blockchain Association, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Online Lenders Alliance, Day 1 Alliance, GEO Group, Lignite Energy Council, National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, National Mining Association, CoreCivic, and the National ATM Council.

It also has a list of dozens of other politicians who endorse it. Every single one is a Republican. Zero Democrats endorse it.

In a case where there is not another post to link to this stuff, here is the process for finding all of this information:

This is Congress's official website on where to find the full text of diferent kinds of bills: https://www.congress.gov/help/legislation-text. It will include the name of the official who introduced it. Here is their main page: https://www.congress.gov/

Here are the two websites for records of Senate and House Votes: You can look up bills by name, number, and session and see who voted for what when by clicking on the links to the current House and Senate sessions and entering a bill's title, number or even just a key word on the voting topic—so you can see how they've voted in the past.

Here are the lists of official websites of congresspeople and senators to check who they are and what they're doing, because, again, they will usually tell you.

https://clerk.house.gov/Members#MemberProfiles

WHY is this being promoted the way it is?

This is worth thinking through, and the answers to the first few questions will help to give you a sense of the goals of this legislation. Once again Senator Cramer is helping us out here, by announcing his goals openly!

"In recent years, prominent American banks have engaged in a discriminatory practice, referred to as debanking. Banks and financial institutions use their economic standing to categorically exclude law-abiding, legal industries by refusing to lend or provide services to them... This includes industries such as firearms, ammunition, crypto, federal prison contractors, as well as energy producers... When progressives failed at banning these entire industries, what they did instead is they turned to weaponizing banks as sort of a backdoor to carry out their activist goals..."

WHERE and WHEN is an issue being raised?

In this case, it's a bit confusing, which is why I left it for last; the overlap of Steam and Itch.io deleting a bunch of content over credit card provider access makes it seem like this bill is connected. This is, I think, the biggest reason why the post took off: because it could be linked to something else that users had seen, cared about, and want a solution to. Unfortunately OP doesn't seem to have looked further than that before hitting "post", nor did some others before calling their reps.

However, there are other cases in which where and when can provide extremely vital context for a measure.

For example, you'd think that measures which claim to "prevent religious discrimination" would be to the benefit of religious minorities, because preventing religious discrimination is something which is vitally necessary in a time of escalating hate crimes and social ostracism against many groups! However, under Trump, "religious discrimination" often means specifically focusing on so-called 'anti-Christian bias'. So the WHERE (coming from the Federal Government) and WHEN (a time when the government is controlled by people who routinely discriminate against religious minorities) can help flag that, hey, this thing that sounds good in theory might not actually be as good as it looks on the surface. This is one way of combatting the weasely, vague language this kind of bill sometimes uses.

WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?

@cardassiangoodreads rightly suggested looking at resources like FiveCalls which cover a lot of important progressive bills, to check if it appears there (they have topics covering censorship, etc) and suggests calls to legislators.

[hallowsheep]

Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, Paypal.

We can apply pressure to their support lines.

If 1000 calls and emails from an extremist group trying to censor all media got through to them, the outrage from everyone else is sure to.

[hallowsheep]

As part of the UK online safety act nonsense, itch.io has now blocked anyone in the UK from viewing any product tagged NSFW or from viewing the profile pages of any developer who sells any product tagged NSFW even if all the rest of their items are not.