#HTTP pipelining

[garudabluffs]

VIDEO 16:50 Forward for short explanation + 38:40 -->

Part personal pilgrimage, part deft critique, Dennett’s insightful reportage examines what happens to international relations when oil wealth hangs in the balance, and she shines a glaring light on what so many have actually been dying for.

Through stories and maps, she reveals how feverish competition among superpower intelligence networks, military, and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks, misguided foreign policy, and targeted killings that continue to this day.

The book delivers an irrefutable indictment of these devastating forces and demonstrates how the brutal violence they incite has shaped the Middle East and birthed an era of endless conflict.

Follow the Pipelines also brings new questions to the fore:

To what lengths has the United States negotiated with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS to secure Big Oil’s holdings in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen?

Was the Pentagon’s goal of defeating ISIS a fraudulent pretext for America’s occupation of Syrian eastern provinces and a land grab for oil?

Did the infamous double agent Kim Philby, who worked for the British while secretly spying for the Russians, have anything to do with Dennett’s death?

Why have the US and China made North Africa the next major battleground in the Great Game for Oil?

Charlotte Dennett is a former Middle East reporter, investigative journalist, and attorney. She is the co-author of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. Dennett’s brother, Daniel C. Dennett III, famed philosopher and author of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds and Consciousness Explained, wrote the foreword to her latest book.

[echoekhi]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tech’s benevolent-dictator-for-life to authoritarian pipeline

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

Silicon Valley's "authoritarian turn" is hard to miss: tech bosses have come out for autocrats like Trump, Orban, Milei, Bolsonaro, et al, and want to turn San Francisco into a militia-patrolled apartheid state operated for the benefit of tech bros:

https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

Smart people have written well about what this means, and have gotten me thinking, too:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-did-silicon-valley-turn-right

Regular readers will know that I make a kind of hobby of collecting definitions of right-wing thought:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

One of these – a hoary old cliche – is that "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." I don't give this one much credence, but it takes on an interesting sheen when combined with this anonymous gem: "Conservatives say they long for the simpler times of their childhood, but what they miss is that the reason they lived simpler lives back then wasn't that the times were simpler; rather, it's because they were children."

If you're a tech founder who once lived in a world where your workers were also your pals and didn't shout at you about labor relations, perhaps that's not because workers got "woke," but rather, because when you were all scrapping at a startup, you were all on an equal footing and there weren't any labor relations to speak of. And if you're a once-right-on tech founder who used to abstractly favor "social justice" but now find yourself beset by people demanding that you confront your privilege, perhaps what's changed isn't those people, but rather the amount of privilege you have.

In other words, "a reactionary tech boss is a liberal tech boss who hired a bunch of pals only to have them turn around and start a union." And also: "Tech founders say things were simpler when they were running startups, but what they miss is that the reason no one asked their startup to seriously engage with the social harms it caused is the because the startup was largely irrelevant to society, while the large company it turned into is destroying millions of peoples' lives today."

The oft-repeated reactionary excuse that "I didn't leave the progressive movement, they left me," can be both technically true and also profoundly wrong: if progressives in your circle never bothered you about your commercial affairs, perhaps that's because those affairs didn't matter when you were grinding out code in your hacker house, but they matter a lot now that you have millions of users and thousands of employees.

I've been in tech circles since before the dawn of the dotcoms; I was part of a movement of people who would come over to your house with a stack of floppies and install TCP/IP and PPP networking software on your computer and show you how to connect to a BBS or ISP, because we wanted everyone to have as much fun as we were having.

Some of us channeled that excitement into starting companies that let people get online, create digital presences of their own, and connect with other people. Some of us were more .ORG than .COM and gave our lives over to activism and nonprofits, missing out on the stock options and big paydays. But even though we ended up in different places, we mostly started in the same place, as spittle-flecked, excited kids talking a mile a minute about how cool this internet thing would be and helping you, a normie, jump into it.

Many of my peers from the .ORG and .COM worlds went on to set up institutions – both companies and nonprofits – that have since grown to be critical pieces of internet infrastructure: classified ad platforms, online encyclopedias, CMSes and personal publishing services, critical free/open source projects, standards bodies, server-to-server utilities, and more.

These all started out as benevolent autocracies: personal projects started by people who pitched in to help their virtual neighbors with the new, digital problems we were all facing. These good people, with good impulses, did good: their projects filled an important need, and grew, and grew, and became structurally important to the digital world. What started off as "Our pal's project that we all pitch in on," became, "Our pal's important mission that we help with, but that also has paid staff and important stakeholders, which they oversee as 'benevolent dictator for life.'"

Which was fine. The people who kicked off these projects had nurtured them all the way from a napkin doodle to infrastructure. They understood them better than anyone else, had sacrificed much for them, and it made sense for them to be installed as stewards.

But what they did next, how they used their powers as "BFDLs," made a huge difference. Because we are all imperfect, we are all capable of rationalizing our way into bad choices, we are all riven with insecurities that can push us to do things we later regret. When our actions are checked – by our peers' social approval or approbation; by the need to keep our volunteers happy; by the possibility of a mass exodus of our users or a fork of our code – these imperfections are balanced by consequences.

Dictators aren't necessarily any more prone to these lapses in judgment than anyone else. Benevolent dictators actually exist, people who only retain power because they genuinely want to use that power for good. Those people aren't more likely to fly off the handle or talk themselves into bad places than you or me – but to be a dictator (benevolent or otherwise) is to exist without the consequences that prevent you from giving in to those impulses. Worse: if you are the dictator – again, benevolent or otherwise – of a big, structurally important company or nonprofit that millions of people rely on, the consequences of these lapses are extremely consequential.

This is how BDFL arrangements turn sour: by removing themselves from formal constraint, the people whose screwups matter the most end up with the fewest guardrails to prevent themselves from screwing up.

No wonder people who set out to do good, to help others find safe and satisfying digital homes online, find themselves feeling furious and beset. Given those feelings, can we really be surprised when "benevolent" dictators discover that they have sympathy for real-world autocrats whose core ethos is, "I know what needs to be done and I could do it, if only the rest of you would stop nagging me about petty bullshit that you just made up 10 minutes ago but now insist is the most important thing in the world?"

That all said, it's interesting to look at the process by which some BDFLs transitioned to community-run projects with checks and balances. I often think about how Wikipedia's BDFL, the self-avowed libertarian Jimmy Wales, decided (correctly, and to his everlasting credit), that the project he raised from a weird idea into a world-historic phenomenon should not be ruled over by one guy, not even him.

(Jimmy is one of those libertarians who believes that we don't need governments to make us be kind and take care of one another because he is kind and takes care of other people – see also John Gilmore and Penn Jillette:)

https://www.cracked.com/article_40871_penn-jillette-wants-to-talk-it-all-out.html

Jimmy's handover to the Wikimedia Foundation gives me hope for our other BDFLs. He's proof that you can find yourself in the hotseat without being so overwhelmed with personal grievance that you find yourself in sympathy with actual fascists, but rather, have the maturity and self-awareness to know that the reason people are demanding so much of you is that you have – deliberately and with great effort – created a situation in which you owe the world a superhuman degree of care and attention, and the only way to resolve that situation equitably and secure your own posterity is to share that power around, not demand that you be allowed to wield it without reproach.

[theheckle01]

I have had some variation of this phrase in my head since I came out tbh.

Edit: someone mentioned this would make a good shirt, so I made it a shirt. Get it here: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/71992646-another-result-of-the-bionicle-to-trans-pipeline

[sapphicides]

saw my list of black sapphic books to read this month, but don’t really read? i got you, here’s a list of black sapphic films (or films featuring black sapphics) to watch this black history month

documentaries:

stormé: lady of the jewel box (1991, dir. michelle parkerson)*

black/womyn: conversations with lesbians of african descent (2008, dir. tiona nekkia mcclodden)*

difficult love (2010, dir. zanele muholi & peter goldsmid)*

shakedown (2018, dir. leilah weinraub)*

drama:

the watermelon woman (1996, dir. cheryl dunye)*

pariah (2011, dir. dee rees)*

rafiki (2018, dir. wanuri kahiu)*

selah and the spades (2019, dir. tayarisha poe)*

valley of a thousand hills (2022, dir. bonie sithebe)*

tahara (2020, dir. olivia peace)

mars one (2022, dir. gabriel martins)

rom-com:

the incredibly true adventure of two girls in love (1995, dir. maria maggenti)

comedy:

d.e.b.s. (2004, dir. angela robinson)*

bottoms (2023, dir. emma seligman)

horror:

the mark of lilith (1986, dir. bruna fionda, polly gladwin, & isiling mack-nataf)

good manners (2017, dir. juliana rojas & marco dutra)

the perfection (2018, dir. richard shepherd)

jagged mind (2023, dir. kelley kali)*

bodies bodies bodies (2023, dir. halina reijn)

thriller:

set it off (1996, dir. f. gary gray)

the eiffel tower mystery (2016, dir. léa fazer)

how to blow up a pipeline (2022, dir. daniel goldhaber)

short films:

sunday’s child (2019, dir. maisie richardson-sellers)*

tender (2019, dir. felicia pride)*

ìfé (2020, dir. uyaiedu ipke-etim)*

the beginning & the middle (2021, dir. alexis g. zall)

heart shot (2022, dir. marielle woods)

grace (2024, dir. natalie jasmine harris)*

honorable mention: i saw the tv glow (2024, dir. jane schoenbrun), for what i felt was some undeniable implied sapphicism between the two main characters but was never actually explicitly canonized

additional info:

* indicates that the film listed was directed by a black woman/non-binary person

-> “why wasnt this film with black sapphics listed?” likely because the film doesn’t feature a black sapphic(s) as the main character. i tried to create a list of films that are least somewhat centric on black sapphics, no background characters or subplots

many of these films require trigger warnings, especially the dramas, horrors, and thrillers. please do your due diligence and search up warnings for yourself, as there are too many to list here. https://www.doesthedogdie.com is a good resource for this

feel free to add more to this post if you have more recs! happy black history month

[twopoppies]

hi!!! new larry anon again ☺️ idk how big your platform is as i’m still learning who’s who in the fandom but i wanted to drop this here https://youtu.be/OV8Rdn94PjU?si=YpYmCIb0OARX6M7F as i feel this is a very IN YOUR FACE proof for larry that it seems arden missed out in their series at about 4:20 in they’re discussing the fandom made traits given to them where harry is hot & dangerous and louis is funny & adorable, louis agrees harry is hot and then have a cute moment but then when harry comments on louis’ he says he’s funny, handsome, ragged, manly which prompts louis to say thank u DANGEROUS SLAVE and harry was so taken aback but also turned on he said “i’ll get you for that tonight” …. no wonder this got scrubbed off the internet and then in the comment section lesliecaraway5 said that the french harry spoke in the beginning was “i went to the cinema with my boyfriend and family” and now not many people picked up on that so just passing this along. i must say i love larries dedication so much for me to be able to experience their truth so many years later and i’m so glad you didn’t comply to management no matter how much they encouraged other fans to bully/scapegoat you. sorry if this was a bit long ♥️♥️♥️

Hi, darling. I'm pretty sure Louis called him Dangerous Dave (not Slave), but that whole interaction is ridiculously intimate, regardless. As for Harry's famous French sentence that he repeats constantly (LOL!), he's saying "mes copains" and not "mon copain" (the first being "my friends," the second being "my boyfriend").

Given that the sentence very much sounds like something he learned in school, and that he's said it NUMEROUS times, I would lean toward "mes copains." Here's a native French speaker discussing it.

Now, from what I understand, it's mostly children whouse the word copain for "friend", but again, Harry is barely 17 here, and he's using a phrase learned in school. He may be aware that it can be used for "friend" or "boyfriend" depending on the context, intonation, etc., and that's why he likes it, but I don't think he's purposely using the word for boyfriend to indicate Louis is his boyfriend.

Native French speakers, feel free to correct me there, but we've had this discussion through the years, and that's how I remember it. @leah3477sblog @fredficaccount.

Last, I know new fans love Cosmic Leeds, and we're so lucky there is still someone making great videos for this fandom. But if you'd also like to see the OG creator of the average fan to rabid larrie pipeline, check out freddieismyqueen's videos

These are just a few. If you go through my tag you'll find links to all of her videos.

And here's the rest of my FIMQ tag

[spot-the-antisemitism]

not-so-fun fact: beloved tumblr funnyman pukicho is antisemitic (https://www.tumblr.com/pukicho/780296141097123840/thoughts-on-the-minecraft-movie?source=share)

"I support Jewish people, silly, I just don't support 80-90 percent of them"

and of course everyone in the notes is acting like Jack Black being a Jewish Zionist is a worse crime than him supporting autism $peaks (one person in the reblogs even used the Z slur in their tags)

To my followers who asked if Pukicho and Gaudest patronus were antisemitic as paper mario wiki we have our answer to the former

the tumblr funnyman to useful idiot pipeline at work. Guess he didn’t make it big in the entertainment world either

[pinsupansu]

happy early birthday, @danielhowell 🧡

i'm very glad to be immortalising your doomer to boomer pipeline on cake

a vegan three tier orange flavoured (and also orange coloured, just like the cubes!) cake covered in black dark chocolate buttercream (basically a terry chocolate orange dream). and yes, i ate all that by myself as i was too embarassed to show it to anyone

this was a cake i did for the #cakedupfordan challenge Phandom Gives organized, please check them out:

(https://phandomgives.com/) 💜

[respectissexy]

This is a LONG post about how to combat Incel beliefs online and in the people you know. 

I’ve had a long-term fascination with Incels, and at times have belonged to some online communities aimed at deradicalizing them. Here are some of the facts, statistics, and logical arguments I’ve accumulated in a few years of having these conversations with self-identified Incels.

I want to make it clear that there is no point in having these arguments with the “women should all be shipped to government-run rape camps” kinds of Incels. I’m talking more about the “I’m going to die alone because I don’t have 100k for leg lengthening surgery” variety, who are in the pipeline but not all the way there yet.

Even within that, if you're a woman, don’t bother having this debate with someone who is incapable of having a respectful conversation with a woman – if you catch a whiff of “that’s exactly what a lying femoid would say,” just cut your losses. The people you want to target are people you have a strong pre-existing relationship with (“my little brother has started watching terrible YouTube videos”) and people who admit to being unsatisfied with their worldview (“believing in the Blackpill is making me miserable, I just want to be normal, but I keep getting sucked back in because I find it so convincing.”)

When you’re trying to deradicalize someone, it helps to meet them where they’re at by admitting anything they’re correct about. 

The two Incel beliefs that I freely admit are correct are: it is easier to get sex/romance if you’re conventionally attractive (more on why this doesn’t mean everyone else should give up later) and, there are plenty of hideously sexist and depraved men who get pussy all the time, so it’s obviously not true that the only reason some people are Incels is because they have bad attitudes towards women. (I call this “sex and love are not a meritocracy.”)

Someone who is capable of engaging with you in good faith will usually become much more relaxed and willing to listen if you concede these two points – which, I cannot stress enough, are obviously true. There is no point in trying to sell someone on the idea that respecting women is the true key to getting laid. Anyone with eyes can see that some men who respect women don’t get laid and plenty of men who get laid don’t respect women. 

In only the loosest possible order (roughly moving from the world of provable facts and statistics to the world of more theoretical logical argument) here are some common responses to standard “Incel” or “blackpill” arguments.

The sexual marketplace favors women. Women are all out there fucking Chad while increasing numbers of men are sexless. There are way more virgin men than virgin women.

Between the ages of 20-24, 14% of men and 12% of women self-identify as virgins. This is a 2% difference. Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/on-late-in-life-virginity-loss/284412/

It's over for you if you didn't date/have sex in high school or college.

While 14% of men are virgins between the ages of 20 and 24, only 5% are still virgins in their late 20s, and only 0.3% are still virgins by 40 (and this number includes the voluntarily and religiously celibate.) So even if you are a virgin at age 22, your chances of having sex by age 40 are around 99.7%. You are statistically MUCH more likely to be a "late bloomer" than a lifelong Incel. (Source: The CDC quoted in the article above) Also, only about 50% of people have had sex by the time they graduate high school. So whether you do or not, you're completely normal either way. It's a coin flip. Source: The CDC https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2017/201706_NSFG.htm#:~:text=The%20data%20represent%20all%20teens,%2C%20the%20percent%20was%2044%25

The average modern young woman has had sex with dozens or hundreds of men, and an inexperienced man could never satisfy her!

Some women have! But while the average lifetime number of sexual partners for both men and women varies by study, it is consistently fewer than 10. I find this belief is often based on poor statistical reasoning – a friend or acquaintance tells you that she hooked up with a guy this weekend and a different guy two weeks ago, so you extrapolate that she’s been fucking two different men per month since becoming sexually active, and assume her number must be in the hundreds. Most people have a varied sexual career that includes some casual hookups, some FWBs or flings, some dry spells, and some periods of long-term monogamy.

To the extent that the average “body count” may have gone up in recent decades, this is likely less because today’s young people are uniquely promiscuous and more because they tend to settle down with a life partner later – if you become sexually active at 17 and marry monogamously at 30, you will probably fuck more people in your lifetime than if you became sexually active at 17 and monogamously married at 24.

I would add here, it is really important to try to ground people in the statistical reality of typical “body counts” rather than going whole hog on trying to convince them that body counts don’t matter. It’s perfectly understandable to feel that someone who’s had 0 sexual partners and someone who’s had 100 may have different enough attitudes towards sex that a relationship between them might not work out. “You’re actually misogynist trash if you’d be intimidated to date a woman who had 100 past partners” is less effective for our purposes than “It’s possible that you wouldn’t be compatible with a woman who had that many past partners – you may not want her and she also may not want you! – but that’s just one example of the many reasons people can be incompatible that don’t come down to one of them being Bad and Unloveable.” 

Women are much more harsh and shallow than men, as evidenced by the studies where they rated 80% of men as Below Average on OKCupid. Women only message the most attractive men.

That study has been reported in SUCH a misleading way that it actually proves the opposite of what Incels think it proves. Although women WERE harsher in their ratings, they were actually MUCH MORE LIKELY THAN MEN to message users whose photos they didn't rate that high in attractiveness – possibly reflecting that women are more likely to realize that how you feel about someone’s picture isn’t a perfect predictor of whether you’ll find them attractive irl. (Just anecdotally speaking, most women I know report that men don’t take great pictures of themselves, so they may be giving them wiggle room for that.) The percentage of messages that goes to the most attractive women compared to the average woman, is much more extreme than the ratio for men. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJxteLDlJ-ORw_Sw-tDDYhHv0Xnvaco4Vk-d3mPRZg_Cu9ckzOf9FS-vbGz75_mnw7-uyqoldlf7-wEmbLo4KiFsvzkbw9kn9X3qTDZC9-ubfR9EXH54a0QVJ1QkyK1xK8osO_M9mGyNRK-ShWwPoEGt9ROicoGA4bIFnQnRe0cO

If you're not in the top 20% hottest men, no woman will ever want you.

71% of men between the ages of 25 and 44 have been married. It is mathematically impossible for 71% of men to be in the top 20%.

Women spend their youth fucking hot Chads and then settle down with ugly men later after they 'hit the wall'.

People of all genders tend to prioritize attractiveness more in a partner when they're young, their bodies are at Peak Sex Hormone, and their relationships are more about fun and passion than building a life together. People of all genders tend to increasingly prioritize stability, compatibility, and other life-building qualities once they're looking for someone to settle down with and start a family. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just smart. 

Looks obviously matter! It’s not true that dating is all about personality and respecting women! There is a middle ground between believing that looks don't matter at all and being fully blackpilled. "It's easier to get a girlfriend when you're tall and hot" is straightforwardly true, but so is, "regardless, literally millions of men who aren't tall or conventionally hot get laid and have loving relationships." I always say it like, being super conventionally attractive may mean you get to date on easy mode, but refusing to play the game because you didn't get to play it on easy mode is YOUR choice.

I’m too afraid to actually talk to women, but I can just tell that they all hate me!

It's impossible to judge whether you're actually unsuccessful with women if you never talk to them. If you aren't actually shooting your shot with the women you like, then you are “volcel” regardless of how you see yourself, just the same as how if you were unemployed and never applied to any jobs, that would make you unemployed by choice. Imagine you had a friend who was always complaining about how miserable it is to be unemployed and bemoaning all the things that make him unemployable, but then you found out he'd never applied to a single job -- or applied to fewer than ten before giving up altogether. That's most Incels, as far as dating is concerned.

For what it’s worth, this is why pickup artistry sometimes works much better than you would expect it to. Despite the obvious manipulation and general weirdness of pickup artist tactics, the fact remains that if you take a guy who was previously sitting in his bedroom hoping for pussy to fall from the ceiling, and you convince him to go out and hit on a bunch of women, his chances of getting laid will increase. Going out and talking to the people you find attractive is no guarantee of getting laid, but it is generally a prerequisite. 

I saw a bunch of Tweets and TikToks from women belittling short men and saying they’d never date one! Some of them had hundreds of thousands of likes!

You simply cannot take things that assholes say on the internet personally. I'm a 34 year old woman with Bipolar Disorder and 11 tattoos. Do you know how many heavily-liked Tweets there are about how women over 30, women with mental illnesses, and women with tattoos are untouchable garbage that no self-respecting man would ever entertain a relationship with? And yet... I'm married. Turns out a bunch of keyboard warriors raving about how no man would ever want me didn't actually prevent men from wanting me. You probably would think I was being a little unfair if I told you that seeing those posts made me despise all men, and a little unrealistic if it made me give up on dating. Literally ask any woman with blue hair and a septum piercing if men IRL find her as disgusting as men on the internet say they do.

If you read all this, thank you! And as always remember that I block absolutely everyone who annoys me on my posts, so if you feel moved to argue that anything short of trying to persuade avowed Incels to adopt full-bore sex-positive feminism is capitulation, or that we should just kill them all, or whatever, just remember you'll be arguing with yourself. Peace and love on planet Earth.

[odinsblog]

Dear President Biden,

We come together as artists and advocates, but most importantly as human beings witnessing the devastating loss of lives and unfolding horrors in Israel and Palestine.

We ask that, as President of the United States, you call for an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Gaza and Israel before another life is lost. More than 5,000 people have been killed in the last week and a half – a number any person of conscience knows is catastrophic. We believe all life is sacred, no matter faith or ethnicity and we condemn the killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians.

We urge your administration, and all world leaders, to honor all of the lives in the Holy Land and call for and facilitate a ceasefire without delay – an end to the bombing of Gaza, and the safe release of hostages. Half of Gaza’s two million residents are children, and more than two thirds are refugees and their descendants being forced to flee their homes. Humanitarian aid must be allowed to reach them.

We believe that the United States can play a vital diplomatic role in ending the suffering and we are adding our voices to those from the US Congress, UNICEF, Doctors without Borders, The International Committee of The Red Cross, and so many others. Saving lives is a moral imperative. To echo UNICEF, “Compassion — and international law — must prevail.”

As of this writing more than 6,000 bombs have been dropped on Gaza in the last 12 days — resulting in one child being killed every 15 minutes.

“Children and families in Gaza have practically run out of food, water, electricity, medicine and safe access to hospitals, following days of air strikes and cuts to all supply routes. Gaza’s sole power plant ran out of fuel Wednesday afternoon, shutting down electricity, water and wastewater treatment. Most residents can no longer get drinking water from service providers or household water through pipelines…. The humanitarian situation has reached lethal lows, and yet all reports point to further attacks. Compassion — and international law — must prevail.” – UNICEF spokesperson, James Elder

Beyond our pain and mourning for all of the people there and their loved ones around the world we are motivated by an unbending will to stand for our common humanity. We stand for freedom, justice, dignity and peace for all people – and a deep desire to stop more bloodshed.

We refuse to tell future generations the story of our silence, that we stood by and did nothing. As Emergency Relief Chief Martin Griffiths told UN News, “History is watching.”

Alia Shawkat

Alyssa Milano

Amanda Seales

Amber Tamblyn

America Ferrera

Andrew Garfield

Anoushka Shankar

Aria Mia Loberti

Ayo Edebiri

Bassam Tariq

Bassem Youssef

Cate Blanchett

Channing Tatum

Cherien Dabis

Darius Marder

David Cross

Dominique Fishback

Dominique Thorne

Elvira Lind

Farah Bsaiso

Fatima Farheen Mirza

Hasan Minhaj

Hend Sabry

Ilana Glazer

Indya Moore

James Schamus

Jeremy Strong

Jessica Chastain

Joaquin Phoenix

Jon Stewart

Kristen Stewart

Macklemore

Mahershala Ali

Margaret Cho

Mark Ruffalo

May Calamawy

Michael Malarkey

Michael Stipe

Michelle Wolf

Mo Amer

Oscar Isaac

Quinta Brunson

Ramy Youssef

Riz Ahmed

Rooney Mara

Rosario Dawson

Ryan Coogler

Sandra Oh

Sebastian Silva

Shailene Woodley

Shaka King

Susan Sarandon

Vic Mensa

Wallace Shawn

Wanda Sykes

👉🏿 https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/hollywood-demands-gaza-israel-ceasefire-joaquin-phoenix-cate-blanchett-1235763646/

[oneterabyteofkilobyteage]

original url http://www.geocities.com/Pipeline/Halfpipe/9015/ last modified 2009-04-24 05:17:02

[nowimjustastranger]

I have been binge-reading your tumblr all day, and AHHHH, dude I love the StCMO AU so much holy shit. I cannot get enough of it. I actually read a Rick and Morty fic somewhat similar to this? It only focuses on one perspective, though. High key recommend:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22024960

Also love love loveee your fics! I actually first subscribed to your AO3 back when you were first writing Supernatural fanfiction, and then I found you again when I got into Gravity Falls ❤️. The Supernatural to Gravity Falls pipeline is SO REAL and there are so many similarities between Dean vs Stan and Sam vs Ford that it haunts me. I have so many fic ideas just based on episodes of Supernatural 😂. HIWTHI is actually lightly inspired by s2e20.

Sorry, I'm ranting. I had a few questions related to StCMO:

1. What would StCMO!Ford do about a Stan and Ford stuck in a death time loop together? Somewhat similarly to Deja Vu by interlude (though it doesn't have to be), but if it wasn't resolved? I gotta know how he feels about the crossbow death 😭

2. WWS!FD if Bill is constantly going after Stan through Rico and the cartel and whoever else because Ford wanted to make amends with his brother before the portal was finished? Bill doesn't want the distraction, and all of Stan's enemies are easily manipulated into deals to kill Stan off? (an AU of mine i've been toying with)

3. Does he ever feel a little bit detached after going through so many dimensions of Stans and Fords? I feel like it would be easy to become desensitized to it and forget the original perspective he started with.

Holy shit hi! Lovely to see you in the bottomless hole that is the GF fandom with me lmao. And yeah, lots of parallels with respective sets of brothers! I will absolutely read your fic rec! It looks delicious.

Death Loop

Admittedly, Ford 419"3 would have some trouble getting into the time loop, but he'd find a way if it meant safely breaking it. The hardest part for Ford 419"3 would be seeing Stan die and having to wait for the loop to reset. Lots of bad memories being dredged up. Because not only is he traumatized by his time in Bill's clutches, but the missions that go wrong had also left lingering mental wounds. Ford would have to figure out how to keep Stan and his brother alive long enough for Ford to actually break the time loop, so he'd have his hands full to say the least.

Bill is a Bitch

Ford would be having none of that shit. He'd probably enlist Lee to act as a bodyguard and have Lee deliver Stan to his brother safely while Ford handled the threats at the source (ie: wiping out all the gangs that have a vendetta against Stan). After he finished his task or removing the vast majority of threats against Stan to make it harder for Bill to find a puppet, Ford 419"3 would meet Lee and Stan at his counterpart's shack, showing his counterpart the evidence that he and Lee had collected to prove that Bill was behind the attempts on Stan's life.

Same Shit, Different Day

Ford doesn't become desensitized, per say, but seeing so much bad shit does leave it's mark on him. Instead of becoming numb to it, he had become obsessed with the safety of his loved ones. He's mentally unwell in the sense that he's constantly on alert, no longer able to truly let his guard down. Even with Lee and the niblings, unfortunately. He's more like a feral animal than a man, viciously protecting those that he considers his until death. He has insomnia due to his anxiety and paranoia, only sleeping when his body literally shuts down on him. Lee and Fiddleford are working on coaxing him to sleep a little here and there before that happens, but it's slow-going.

[olderthannetfic]

yeah this is the reason i stopped writing for dramione

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/767816608125255680/i-may-be-new-to-all-this-but-i-dont-understand?source=share

I'm in my 40s and the last time I was in fandom it was the livejournal era and during pandemic I rediscovered fandom and found ao3 (I didn't know it existed!! when my friend showed it to me my mind was blown!!) and started writing dramione again, but the more I spent time in the community the more I felt that not only the readers were expecting "published book" levels of quality from the fics but also other authors were openly admitting that this is the way for them to gain audience and pull to publish or just use the fandom popularity to land a deal, it was so jarring to me to hear and see this, and the more jarring part was people not calling out this but rather encouraging these authors. And knowing that Manacled will be pulled to publish, Auction and two others I don't remember are being pulled to published and there were big articles from Business Insider and Variety covering this "pull to publish" thing not necessarily as a bad thing. And the people in the ship subreddit and big discords are happy about it and cheering it on really stopped feeling like a fandom to me.

I have moved on to write for rare-pairs in HP and its so much better and chiller there, and interactions are better and the sub communities are much nicer and it doesn't feel like I"m writing for some mass production pipeline or something but for my fun.

--

Ohhh yeah. There are a few big het ships where this culture runs rampant.

If they want to girlboss their way to a book deal, fine. But I'm not hanging out in wannabe influencer space.

[soulsty]

I drew my weird fav/comfort character pipeline in the Goofy movie car meme

I used a template, you can find it here:

https://www.deviantart.com/the-king-zhaul/art/That-one-Car-meme-but-as-a-Template-1009746980

[pluraljoyis]

Not exactly "plural joy is", but this post https://www.tumblr.com/pluraljoyis/781362457648234496/plural-joy-is-the-new-alter-in-my-partner-system? reminded me of a similar experience in our system!

The new alter was (and still is) rather aggressive and hostile to discourage social interaction, but due to having no self-preservation (/j) I interacted anyways! 😁

And now he's still aggressive to others BUT as soon as he's with me he's the softest sweetest person ever! (Total cat energy; he is never beating the allegations lol)

[ Image ID: an anonymous tumblr ask reading: 'Plural joy is the "new alter in my partner system wants me dead" to "new alter in my partner system is deeply in love with me" pipeline. (small note, she didn't actually want to hurt me, she was just scared and confused because she had no idea what planet she was on, what technology was, etc)'

Response reading: 'Very familiar with that pipeline...' ]

That's so real- one of the first major relationships with our partner system was with the hissiest crankiest woman we'd ever formed and The One Guy She Was Squishy Around hehehe. Do NOT let him beat those allegations

[allthecanadianpolitics]

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/liberal-leadership/article/chretien-says-we-should-hit-the-us-where-it-hurts-and-canada-should-build-a-natural-gas-pipeline-from-alberta-to-quebec/

Aren’t there less earrh killing ways to improve our economy?