queercaptainflint - Tumblr blog

[queercaptainflint]

Hey all, covid season is about to really ramp up - so here's a few things you might not be doing that can help

As an immunocompromised person, i'm begging you to consider doing one or three of these things. I've seen very few people talk about them because we want the pandemic to be over, so i'm trying to spread the word, especially as cases go up with winter+holidays.

#1 --- Nasal sprays/prophylactics.

There are several nasal sprays on the market that have been proven to reduce the risk of covid by up to 80%.

(That study was done on a nasal spray with Iota-carrageenan.)

The nasal spray Covixyl was proven to reduce covid infections in healthcare workers by 62%

Nasal sprays with xylitol in them also showed efficacy at lowering viral load, and also helping symtoms if you've contracted covid.

Xlear is one such brand. They were actually sued for saying they prevented covid, and then proved *in a federal court of law* that they were able to prevent covid and treat covid symptoms by 62% - (link here)

You can find similar nasal sprays with xylitol at your local pharmacy, which may be less effective (Studies may vary), but STILL helpful as a preventative.

These sprays last about four hours, and are used prior to engaging with people (and ideally while masking, but even sans mask these are very helpful!)

The sprays in the US range from about $12 to $35, and can be found on amazon and probably your local pharmacy or walmart. Seriously, just blow your nose, use a spray in each nostril, go about your day.

#2 - Mouthwashes with Cetylpyridinium chloride

The ingredient Cetylpyridinium chloride has been proven to lower viral load. Links: here, here, here

Mouthwashes with povidone-iodine, or chlorhexidine gluconate also proved effective but here's the thing: CPC is found in mouthwashes like Crest, Colgate, and Therabreath.

I can buy a mouthwash for $5 at my local grocery that helps reduce viral load just by rinsing my mouth out when I get home after an event.

Usually, the label will advertise active ingredients on the front or cap, so it's not hard to look for.

#3 -- nasal sanitizers.

These have been used in the hospital for a while - if you've had an "elective" procedure done since covid, you might have had your snoot cleaned out with an orange scented q-tip. This is to reduce nasal viral load. It's mostly for use with MRSA right now, but with how much people touch the nose area and how much covid is shed from the nasal passages before/after symptom onset, this can help with spread of covid. To be very clear, full double-blind studies have not been done yet, but it does show some promise.

Either iodine solutions or the brand NOZIN are good options.

These would be used when you got home/after spending time with people to cleanse your nose.

I bought my bottle on amazon for about $25, and it's still going strong ages later. (To be fair, I mostly use it for events where there's been little social distancing or ive felt exposed).

---

TL;DR - if you dont want to read all the studies, here's a good cheap prevention plan:

~Use XLEAR nasal spray before you leave or interact with people ($13.50 on cvs website)

~Come home and use a CPL mouthwash like Crest ($5 on amazon)

~Use a nasal sanitizer with iodine or like nazin - $18-25 after exposure

Combine this with your use of masks, social distancing, air filters, vaccines, and increasing air flow, and you can really reduce the spread of COVID.

While some of these studies are still ongoing, the risk of all of them is essentially nil. And honestly, I will pay $20 and do a few small things to reduce the risk of covid. Most of these are genuinely easier than masking - which I will still be doing. Additionally, they'll reduce risk of colds and flu!

Please signal boost if you can and don't mind ♥ I know this is largely US based brands, but I know there are similar in other places. If you know them please add below!

[queercaptainflint]

People always gloss over how mentally damaging it can be to work in retail. I fucking hate that whenever I say “I could never work in retail again” someone has to reply “You snowflake millennials can’t take a starter job because you have to INTERACT with other people” No. Fuck you. I’ve worked as a planetarium host. I’ve worked as a public speaker. I’ve worked as a tutor and as a student teacher. I can work with people. I can work with crowds. Retail was fucking different. Retail was being treated as a subhuman. Retail was being treated so poorly that you have anxiety attacks before work. Having to work retail was a factor in my last suicide attempt. If I hear you say one fucking word about retail workers playing the victim I will personally break every bone in your body. Fuck You.

[queercaptainflint]

Happy Father’s Day!

[queercaptainflint]

What's Next

The action for #EndOTW racism has officially ended. Originally we called for it to run from May 17th through the 31st. We are completely blown away and heartened by the response of fandom. Even though we’ve seen some racist backlash, the majority of the response we’ve seen has been positive and supportive. For us it has been deeply reassuring to see how important this issue is to fandom as a whole. Over the last two weeks:

5,602 works have added 'End OTW Racism' to their information

Our Collection has grown to 1,606 works

There has been a wealth of discusson on multiple social media platforms about the issue of race in fandom and the OTW

"Now what?" you may ask. We have not yet received any official response from OTW. This is disappointing but not surprising. Calling for institutional change is a marathon, not a sprint, and this was just our opening act. 

We count as a success that we have been able to bring awareness to issues with the OTW in a respectful but insistent manner. It is also a win that we have been able to connect with one another and begin the first of many deeper fandom discussions on how to move forward. Additionally we are heartened that many who work within the OTW have come forward to detail their experiences within the institution. 

We’re also grateful for those people who have signed up to stay involved with us, including volunteering for various related projects and committing to participating in future actions. We’ll be reaching out to everyone who filled out the form in a few weeks - though it may take us a while, given how busy we’ve been with this campaign!

Also, we already have another action planned to coincide with the upcoming OTW elections. Please keep following us here or on our other socials (twitter, dreamwidth) and consider signing up at our form to be alerted when upcoming actions take place. 

Though this action is now officially done, we will be keeping the AO3 Collection open and any works added during the action will remain there unless creators want to remove them. Those who wish may revert their work titles (while keeping them in the collection), though we know many will keep the changed titles going forward. If this is something you are comfortable with, we encourage you to keep them! And should you continue to update new works with End OTW Racism in your title, we welcome you adding the work to the collection. 

Thank you so much to those who participated in this first of, hopefully, many actions. We do not intend to let up until consistent and measurable action on our requests has been taken. 

Fandom Against Racism Team

[queercaptainflint]

End OTW Racism: A Call To Action

A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization

This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies

AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.

In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)

As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.

We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.

On AO3

Change the title of ten (or more!) of your most recent or most popular fanworks to include ‘End Racism in the OTW’ in the beginning, and provide a link to this post in your summary or first/top creator’s note

Post a new fanwork any time between May 17th to 31st with “End Racism in the OTW” either as the title or at the beginning of the title. The fanwork does not have to be long - it can be a 100-word fic, a quick sketch, a podfic of a ficlet, a 20-second vid/edit, a short piece of meta, etc. In the summary or first/top creator’s note, provide a link to this post

If updating any WIPs with a new chapter, add ‘End Racism in the OTW’ to the title and provide a link back to this post in your summary or first/top author’s note

Update your AO3 icon using the profile pic graphic in our Social Media Toolkit

Plan to maintain these changes until May 31, 2023, or longer if you wish

Send a message to the OTW asking for an update on their 2020 commitments!

For Readers: leave encouraging comments on fanworks with the "End Racism in the OTW" title to show your support of this initiative.

On tumblr

Reblog this Call to Action with the tag #End OTW Racism

Update your profile pics and banners using the graphics in our Social Media Toolkit

Follow this account for updates and signal boost our posts

On Twitter

Follow @/EndOTWRacism (remove the backslash) and signal boost our pinned tweet

Update your profile pics and banners using our graphics, and change your display name to include #EndOTWRacism

Use sample tweets and graphics from our Social Media Toolkit to tweet about your fanworks, and use the hashtag #EndOTWRacism

Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!

What Do We Want?

Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:

Harassment policies that can be regularly updated to address both on-site harassment and off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users, with updated protocols for the Policy & Abuse Team to ensure consistent and informed resolutions of abuse claims

A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content; by abusive, we are talking about fanworks that are intentionally used to spread hate and harassment, not those that accidentally invoke racist or other bigoted stereotypes

These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.

OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:

Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3-6 months

Committing to a policy of transparency on this topic, with quarterly updates on the progress of these projects including challenges and their plan for overcoming those challenges. These quarterly updates should be published on OTW News page and newsletters, not solely discussed in Board meetings

Why Are We Doing This?

16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.

In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.

Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:

Improving admin tools for the Policy & Abuse team

Reassessing the current mandatory archive warnings with the possibility of implementing others

And, most importantly, reviewing the Terms of Service (TOS) to allow the Policy & Abuse team to address harassment that is currently not covered by the existing TOS

By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.

Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.

It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.

This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.

We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.

[queercaptainflint]

As of May 15th, image sharing platform Imgur will be purging its site of all not-safe-for-work and anonymously posted content. As part of the site’s new terms of service agreement, Imgur’s definition of “not safe for work” is concerningly broad: it will be removing not only every upload deemed to be pornography or sexually explicit content, but all depictions of nudity (no matter how artistic or educational they are in nature) as well.

Imgur was created in 2009, and has remained one of the most popular image hosting sites on the internet for decades. Its 300 million active users access content on the platform over 60 billion times per month. Compared to other image hosting sites of the early 2000s, such as Photobucket, Imgur has a reputation for being a place to host niche, originally created works, including memes, personal artwork, image macros, fan art, and yes, highly specific porn and fetish content that caters to small yet passionate communities.

Until 2016, the only way to share images on Reddit was by passing them through Imgur first. If you didn’t already have an Imgur account when you were making a Reddit post, you mostly likely uploaded it without bothering to create one, so your image files were posted anonymously. But Imgur is now mass-deleting all images that can’t be linked to an existing account. This means that the vast majority of image posts on Reddit that predate 2016 will be completely broken after Imgur’s new terms of service are adopted. That’s not just posts with pornography or nude photographs that are getting removed, which would be a sizeable data loss itself, but nearly eleven years worth of digital history.

The impact this mass deletion will have can’t be overstated. Reddit has been a crucial hub of information sharing, social networking, and documentation for approaching twenty years now. Over 1.6 billion individual people have made their mark on the site in one way or another — sharing their home renovation projects, posting tattered photographs of long-dead relatives and asking for assistance in getting them restored, pooling together genealogical records, showing off their latest power-washing job, demonstrating how to construct leather harnesses, exchanging theories about their continuity of their favorite German science fiction epics, and far more.

Many of these in-depth Reddit posts are absolutely reliant upon images. And every single one of them that came before 2016 can potentially be ruined following the Imgur purge. Even many posts that were made after 2016 will be destroyed as well, because many Reddit users who upload images to Imgur never create official accounts.

Whenever sexual content is driven from social media, there is little in the way of public mourning. If anything, there is a tepid acknowledgement of the harm that will befall sex workers, alongside outright celebration that at last these sites will be scrubbed of the most unseemly and dangerous sides of human nature, and at last rendered “safe.” But condemning future generations of queer and kinky people to ignorance and loneliness is not saving them. And exposing someone to sexual content too early in life is not the only form of sexual harm. Denying a person a chance at self-recognition can be equally traumatic, and violent.

Those of us who do decry the sanitization and Disney-Worldification of the internet are frequently likened to predators who wish to expose our bodies and proclivities to children. Our mere existence as adult sexual beings with adult bodies is deemed a threat. Paradoxically, we are also mocked for taking the removal of erotic art so seriously. Porn is somehow viewed in our culture as both frivolously pointless, and profoundly terrifying.

But in reality, sex is not dangerous. And sex is not frivolous. It’s a rapturous, inevitable, and an essential force in human life. Sex isn’t for everyone, but it is one of the most precious ways to experience inhabiting a body, and refusing to acknowledge the existence of sex makes it impossible to fully appreciate human history, identity, or any form of art.

Sex’s removal from public discourse and digital record keeping is a hateful, genocidal destruction of one of the most precious aspects of the human experience. We are right to mourn for it. And we are right to fear what comes next, after our bodies are rendered unviewable and our dreams unspeakable.

the first time i posted this essay link, tumblr removed it for being sexual content jesus fucking christ. read the piece, please. our ability to communicate and find one another online is rapidly eroding and this is no light matter

[queercaptainflint]

Next year in Jerusalem!

Take a minute to imagine Passover on Deep Space Nine. Just take a minute. A moment, even.

Assuming the Sisko family is Jewish - not too much of a stretch, given the wonderful names they’ve got, Benjamin and Judith and Jacob and Joseph - then Sisko would be leading the seder, handing out paper copies of the old family haggadot for everyone because it’s not quite right to use a padd for this sort of thing. Joseph is sorry he can’t attend but the two of them spend a week arguing over proper recipes and substitutions and what should be on the restaurant’s menu for the holiday.

Worf knows Pesach, and would be happy to attend. Jadzia’s glad to learn about her husband’s family and their traditions, who’d have a decent chance of finally making it out to the station for a little while. Bashir would bring his own set of Sephardic traditions to the table, and years of lunches with Garak have honed his debate skills to where millennia-old questions about things like kitniyot and “all the days of your life” barely register as challenges.

Kira doesn’t have an easy time with the whole monotheism aspect, but the rest of it, especially the story of being led out of suffering and bondage - she’d be all over that. And Garak doesn’t have much use for religion as a whole, but the other half of the story, of the promise of redemption after exile, would resonate sharply and deeply within him, with him happily attending both seders.

Molly asks the four questions.

[queercaptainflint]

Right now in Weelaunee Forest. Unicorn Riot has a livestream going.

[queercaptainflint]

hating tiktok is not a "back in my day" type thing. tiktok is objectively affecting other social media platforms in detrimental ways. ux elements are being stripped and everything has to have a fucking short video clips function. it's rampant homogenization and it's a problem

[queercaptainflint]

LOL BetterHelp was fined $7.8 million by the FTC for selling user data to companies for advertising purposes, something they were called out for years ago! Can like every podcast stop taking sponsorships from them now. God damn. Quit screwing over your audience for a quick buck!!

[queercaptainflint]

I feel like "it will happen to you too" is important for assimilationist cisgays to understand but also you should still care about people other than yourselves

[queercaptainflint]

Do reblog if you answer, I need a large test group. 

[queercaptainflint]

[queercaptainflint]

[queercaptainflint]

RB if you think CD drives in computers are not obsolete, but in fact still necessary, despite being artificially phased out

[queercaptainflint]

me being raised on 90s internet rules where telling someone online your favorite color was giving out too much personal information watching gen z youtubers give out their real first and last names and telling everyone the exact city and apartment complex where they live

[queercaptainflint]

no more "female and nonbinary" groupings, no more of this. like i get it i do i understand the impulse but no, no thank you, enough, these two things are not in fact necessarily related at all and i don't want to see them lumped together anymore, it is a bad classification system that fails to contextualize the actual diversity of nonbinary people and how masculinity is absolutely included