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The whole thing with the shtick by spoiled assholes of needing to overconsume for their Wounded Inner Child UwU is that you're supposed to parent your Inner Child in order to heal it, right? Give it the care you didn't receive as a child.

So. If all you do for it is getting it treats and trinkets at the direct expense of others, and doing nothing else, then you're parenting it the same way as those absent negligent parents who just give their kid a toy when it starts weeping and call it a day. Real "parents who must learn a tough lesson in a 90s Christmas movie" shit.

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I’m reading The Deviants War: The Homosexual vs The United States of America and the entire point of gay pride as a concept comes from police raids on bars, clubs, public restrooms, etc where gays were humiliated and outed in the newspapers (sometimes with their addresses!) and had careers ruined and lives upended by being associated with perversion and vice squads and all that and they responded by going “no I’m proud” and took that pride to the streets in defiance of the huge mechanism of shame that existed to oppress the gay community into obscurity and so the fact that people are now trying to apply conservative dogma to pride parades to make them “safe for children” or in other words “safe for people with oppressive conservative values” is simply insane

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was genuinely surprised while watching the battle of algiers when the general of the french foreign legion was torturing algerians and reasserting his moral authority to not be called a fascist by saying we are the survivors of buchenwald and dachau in a movie made in 1966. but of course france and britain already called nasser hitler on the nile in 1956 to further israeli ends a mere 11 years after the liberation of those camps. to complain about the instrumentalisation of the holocaust now is to add to a chorus that is long in the memory of anti colonial liberation.

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I've said this before but it bears mentioning again. Intersections of axes of oppression are not always additively bad for the individual. A queer Muslim in a white society is living at the intersection of islamophobia and homophobia, but they're generally rewarded by white society for being rejected by their own religious or cultural community. The cishet Muslims are seen as backward, barbaric aberrations while we are seen as enlightened progressive-minded liberals. This both absolves the white society of its islamophobia by selecting tokens to 'protect' or champion and absolves them of their structural homophobia. It also worsens the existing issues of homonationalism and pinkwashing.

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I do feel like what should have happened is that AI would spark conversations about water use and power use in the general tech/internet sphere, and how so much of the labor needed to keep it running is exploitative of people in the Global South. However, it feels like what has happened instead is a bunch of people have convinced themselves the problem isn't the industry or anything, but actually it's because AI has evil magic powers that make it the only problem. Once we defeat AI, everything will be okay again :)

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Untitled (Two Reclining Young Men, Ink and Wash on Tracing Paper) by Avel de Knight, 1940s.

Avel de Knight (1923-1995) was an African American artist, art educator, and art critic, born in New York to parents who immigrated from Barbados and Puerto Rico. He is known for his watercolour paintings and gouache technique. He taught at the Art Students League of New York and the National Academy School of Fine Arts.

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Growing up, I used to often hear a story. It was one of those tales that would be attributed to everyone; Aesop, Einstein, random men on Facebook. It talked of a man by the sea, surrounded by starfish. Thousands had washed up on the shore and were surely dying without the water.

One by one, this man was throwing starfish into the sea. And in the story, a narrator would approach and ask what the man was doing- that it didn't make a difference since he couldn't save all of them. The man would then throw another starfish back into the sea- to life- and say "It mattered to that one".

It is easy to feel hopeless. It is easy to feel overwhelmed. There are so many people starving, hurting, throughout this world. But you can make a difference. 100 dollars can buy a bag of flour (10 dollars from 10 people!), can be enough to live another week, another month. 100 dollars can be enough to save Amal and her family. They deserve to live! They deserve to eat! They deserve to have a future, and with your help they can have all of this!

If you can't donate, please reblog!!

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Let's Cash Out This Garbage Fire!

With everything happening on itch io, I'm looking into other options for distributing my games. In the meantime I want to make as much as I can before I (potentially) shut down that shop for good. So if you've been interested in buying any of my games, or just want to support a trans woman of color, now's your chance!

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some of the things that are recommened for vaginoplasty are so funny like. there's a four week period where i'm "encouraged to sensually explore the area" but "not allowed to climax" like okay doctor-mandated edging. if you say so lmao

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Cynthia Zhou aka Ethernautics (American, based Philadelphia, PA, USA) - Ant Chess, Paintings: Oil on Canvas

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shoutout to everyone with a flat affect. especially those on the schizophrenia or autism spectrums. or both if youre nasty.

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op turned off reblogs so the correction i made cant be reblogged, so im making a new post, mostly just repeating what i said. tl;dr:

google docs is not randomly deleting peoples work for being nsfw. there is no evidence at all that you are at risk of having google delete your fics for having "inappropriate" content.

this article by the wired is the only "source" op has ever provided. i would very very much recommend both reading the entire article and looking at the linked posts in it for yourself. it is also self-admittedly the only source they've ever found - so keep that in mind. it's about k. renee, an open door romance novelist who had her work restricted by google. "open door romance" refers to works where sex scenes happen on screens and are described in detail. they are explicit works. the article talks about similar things happening to a few different authors who write in the same genre.

the incidents described in this article happened in march 2024, which is over a year ago.

those affected had their works restricted, with a warning message. they were not abruptly deleted out of no where. authors were able to file appeals with google to recover their docs, though i havent found any updates on if they were successful in doing so.

the reason this happened is because google docs incorrectly flagged the shared documents as spam.

That author later posted a video to Instagram explaining that it wasn’t the adult content in the files but rather “Google thought I was spamming people.” Apparently, sending the same doc to scores of people—for example, alpha and beta readers—can make it appear as though the doc was unsolicited.

sharing a document that contains "adult content" with a lot of people will trigger google's automod, but the adult content itself is not the problem. if you are sharing a doc with a handful of people, or arent sharing it at all, this is not going to happen. from my own personal testimony, i have dozens and dozens of explicit, nsfw work in my google docs that ive shared with people, and none of them have been touched. i have not seen a single claim with proof that anyone's work has been deleted in the manner the original op describes.

there is no source at all for original op's claim that google is "using AI to find inappropriate and problematic content". in the above article (again, the only source), ai is mentioned once, to say that k. renee had ai functions turned off and did not think that was the problem.

Renee hadn’t turned on any of the AI functions in Google Workspace, so she doubted it could be chalked up to a bot banning her books. After all, a 2016 paper coauthored by Google researchers revealed that its recurrent neural network language models had been fed thousands of romances. If for some reason a bot was crawling her work, wouldn’t it recognize what it was looking at?

and, lets just think logically for a moment. if google docs was doing some sort of mass cleans of nsfw content using ai, dont you think it would be a more widespread story? would it be this hard to find sources and testimony about it? google docs has literally millions of users, including published authors and scientists and academics. if an ai bot was crawling works and deleting any it deemed nsfw, it would be mainstream news because it would be affecting countless people. and especially without disclosing a change in policy beforehand? they would probably get sued for it!

i am not making this post in defense of google, god forbid. google is open about the fact that they use any "publicly available" information to train their ai models (and did get sued for it), though they claim that they dont take from docs that they dont have permission to. i honestly, genuinely, cannot tell you the veracity of these claims or how serious the scraping is. like, i just do not know if google scrapes from private gdocs. if someone knows more and has better sources they are free to add on to the post.

but i want it to be clear that google docs is not going to randomly delete your works for having nsfw content. docs and pages disappear sometimes because google docs is a mess. you should always back up your files locally (switching to programs like ellipsus doesnt make your work safer, per se, as ellipsus is still cloud-based), and you should consider switching away from google docs if youre staunchly anti-ai, but they are not going to abruptly explode all your fics. that is simply not happening. you do not have to panic.

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Tuareg woman playing a guitar, Algeria 🇩🇿

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i wanted to show everyone my favorite tiktok

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I'm so sick of Bernie Sanders, AOC and the likes

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India's Assam state is systemically cleansing Muslims.