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anonymousfoz · 10 months

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HS Journalism: District Blocking Sites (News)

Note: Some things have to be censored to post it here. If you see a lot of dashes, that is why

Morality. Safety. Student engagement in classes. Some legitimate reasons for blocking websites at schools do exist. However, monetary gain for the school district is behind some censorship that affects both students and teachers–despite educational use of the internet.

School districts and public libraries across the nation have been blocking sites for 22 years. According to the American Association of School Librarians, 98% of the nation’s school districts and public libraries filter the online content that is available to minors. But why? And is blocking sites occurring in truly beneficial ways?

Background

To create a safe environment for students while keeping them focused and off inappropriate sites, Congress passed the Children’s Internet Protection Act on Dec. 15, 2000, and it went into effect on April 20, 2001. CIPA requires that public libraries and certain school districts that have students from kindergarten to twelfth grade use internet filters and other measures to protect students from harmful and obscene content in order to obtain certain federal funding.

The Supreme Court has stated that libraries can unblock the filters for adults who request them. The decision was seen as a major defeat for all libraries in the U.S. and for those who had to use the library internet due to no access at home. The ruling also led to concerns about how CIPA would work in schools and the censorship in that setting.

The Debate

The CIPA law sparked debate over censorship in schools, and with the recent rise of book banning in schools, people have returned to this debate. Two sides emerged with various viewpoints on CIPA and blocking sites. One side agrees to the blocking of sites and wants to enforce more restrictions, and another side opposes district blocking sites and has its various solutions to the conflict. Both sides agree that certain sites with sexual content should be blocked, but that is where the agreement stops.

From opposing broad filters and blocking social media sites to wanting realistic barriers that allow children to form their own ideas, even those who oppose blocking sites don’t agree on solutions to what might be considered “inappropriate” content. The opposing side wants to make educational institutions responsible for online content available to students with more responsibility for decisions being left up to the older students.

“Students already know how to get around the firewall by using their phones as hotspots or going to gaming websites that our filter doesn’t catch,” one teacher said.

Students also bypass the firewall by using virtual private networks or VPNs. The gaming sites that filters don’t catch are typically built using Google Sites, Weebly, or even LinkedIn. Games can be found on Scratch that students can access during class. While the district tries to solve these issues, some in this debate demand parents block sites on their children’s personal devices.

This debate is mainly between parents wanting to protect children versus experiences that occur in the classroom with students and teachers dealing with the frustrating situations caused by their school district’s filters.

In the Classroom

While all districts follow CIPA, each district has its policies which can cause interruption in the classroom. A teacher may have a legitimate assignment ruined by a site being blocked.

The survey and poll sent out to all teachers at Nation Ford showed that of 24 teachers, 17 said they had a legitimate site blocked—either their own sites or another site they were using for educational purposes related to course content. Seven teachers had YouTube blocked for class use or assignments. Three teachers had their websites blocked, which held important information for students and parents.

“My own educational website, which I created for my students that I use with instruction was blocked for a year before I finally got access to it at school again,” a teacher said. “I couldn’t send students to the website for enrichment or anything.”

Of course, some blocked websites are needed. One teacher stated that Pinterest was blocked from students who were using it to look at marketing research. Another talked about Adobe Creative Cloud’s AI features being blocked from students, which would have enhanced creativity in the classroom. Most teachers stated they were frustrated with their experience, some mentioning that due to a helpful site with resources being blocked, they were required to work at home.

Despite these experiences, most teachers agreed that some websites needed to be blocked.

“I like the intention, but it causes some unnecessary issues for students and teachers,” one teacher said.

Another teacher said, “I think our system is behind the times. Teachers should be able to approve certain websites for class use on an individual basis.”

The reasoning behind --SD’s blocking of sites is not well understood.

“In some cases, that [blocking sites] is necessary for students’ health and safety,” another teacher said. “I’d be interested to know how the district is deciding these matters, however, because there are times legitimate and educational sites are blocked, which is frustrating.”

The District Policy

The district policy is mentioned in the IJNDB “Use of Technology Resources by Students,” and according to the document, the district is to provide students with access to electronic and technological resources to help them in school. The district has the right to monitor students’ online activities and restrict access to certain websites they deem inappropriate for academic purposes. The --SD system is not perfect, but it is truly impossible to monitor every student and block all the correct sites. The document also states that anyone using the district network, a district-owned device, or holding a district account should not expect privacy given for anything downloaded, transmitted, or received as the district has access to view that information and search account history. The district also notes that they have the right to change their policy at any given time.

--SD’s Chief Communications Officer, ---- Burke, understands the main issue in this debate.

“In general, if a site is blocked and has educational value to a class, the teacher can work with their administration and the IT Department at the District Office to request the site be unblocked,” Burke said. “The district administration will make the determination depending on the site’s content and compliance with policy IJNDB.”

The district has the final say on whether a site will be unblocked based on the content and what they see as educational value to the class. In classes such as Digital Art & Design or Marketing, the district administration could fail to understand the educational value a site could provide. A year is a long time to wait, teachers say.

Possible Solution

Teachers say they can already see students’ screens with such sites as Netop Vision. While this gives the teacher a lot of control over electronic use, it could ensure students stay on task. Teachers say they know what their class needs. This way, the district can continue broad filtering sites while giving teachers control in the classroom.

#high school newspaper #journalism #writing #my writing #child internet protection act #blocking sites #cipa #School districts blocking websites

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lord-of-the-bundle-of-sticks · 6 months

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can my school district stop cockblocking me every time i do something productive. do you know how many people times i've seen "your access to the internet has been suspended for 5 minutes for repeatedly attempting to visit blocked websites" IM NOT EVEN DOING ANYTHING BAD THE FILTER IS JUST FUCKING AWFUL almost everything is filtered now and its so hard to find good sources as well as. To just work plz let me get my easybib MLA citation

#yapping #I HATE MY DISTRICT #UGH #FUCK ASS FILTER

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darkmaga-retard · 16 days

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Imagine your search terms, key-strokes, private chats and photographs are being monitored every time they are sent. Millions of students across the country don’t have to imagine this deep surveillance of their most private communications: it’s a reality that comes with their school districts’ decision to install AI-powered monitoring software such as Gaggle and GoGuardian on students’ school-issued machines and accounts. As we demonstrated with our own Red Flag Machine, however, this software flags and blocks websites for spurious reasons and often disproportionately targets disadvantaged, minority and LGBTQ youth.

The companies making the software claim it’s all done for the sake of student safety: preventing self-harm, suicide, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. While a noble goal, given that suicide is the second highest cause of death among American youth 10-14 years old, no comprehensive or independent studies have shown an increase in student safety linked to the usage of this software. Quite to the contrary: a recent comprehensive RAND research study shows that such AI monitoring software may cause more harm than good.

That study also found that how to respond to alerts is left to the discretion of the school districts themselves. Due to a lack of resources to deal with mental health, schools often refer these alerts to law enforcement officers who are not trained and ill-equipped to deal with youth mental crises. When police respond to youth who are having such episodes, the resulting encounters can lead to disastrous results. So why are schools still using the software–when a congressional investigation found a need for “federal action to protect students’ civil rights, safety, and privacy”? Why are they trading in their students’ privacy for a dubious-at-best marketing claim of safety?

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sp724 · 8 months

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((OOC pinned post time!

This blog is a roleplay blog meant to be an in-universe blog for Sidney Poindexter from Danny Phantom.

Anyone can interact or send asks, RP blog or not. In fact, asks are very much appreciated, seeing as this version of Sidney was murdered and he/his death would probably be well-known.

Supplementary material for this blog (such as the Wikipedia page Sidney mentions in the blog description, as well as some in-universe True Crime videos on Sidney) can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53753875/chapters/136071178

Mun is over 18, but muse is NOT. (Well. Mentally and physically he's not. He's been dead longer than that but... He can't mentally and physically age.)

This blog will definitely dip into some angst and darker topics at times, due to being run in-universe by a dead, bullied kid. I will try to tag things with the appropriate trigger warnings.

Bullying mentions will NOT be tagged, as the posts falling under that trigger warning include pretty much the entire blog.

More information about this blog below the cut.))

Headcanons:

Died after being shoved into his locker right before Spring Break and left there to starve.

Is a fairly famous case in the online True Crime community due to the mystery around what exactly happened, and the tragedy of him being so close to graduation.

17 years old, permanently.

Left the Ghost Zone at some point after the Christmas Truce, because he realized how many ghosts are bullies who are stronger than him, and he's afraid of a lot of them.

He hangs around the school because it's where he died and he feels an attachment to it. Danny gave him the go-ahead to go back to causing problems for bullies.

Tried to get Vlad to sue the Amity Park school district for him, but they don't have a case.

Blogs I consider to be within the same "canon" as this blog (either because I've interacted with them or because a blog I've interacted with has interacted with them):

@danny-fenton-blog (Danny)

@sam-manson-blog (Sam)

@tucker-foley (Tucker)

@mycelialmadness (Dani)

@therealvladmasters (Vlad)

@vladco-tech-official

@inevitablefuturephantom (Dan)

@paulina-sanchez (Paulina)

@/wes-weston-ghostly-blog (Wes)

@axion-labs-official

@insideaxionlabs

@the-box-ghost-blog

@technus-master-of-tech

@thefentonmeister

@jazz-fenton-blog

@ghost-zone-pd

Tags:

danny phantom rp & roleplay - on almost every post

daily stopbullying reblog - every day sidney reblogs a post linking to the website stopbullying.gov. this is the tag for those, so they can be blocked if you get annoyed by the spam.

ask - for answered asks

reblog - for non-original, not directly roleplay related posts

animal pictures - with the reblog tag, on pictures of animals

nostalgia - with the reblog tag, on things relating to the 1940s and 1950s. specifically things relating to the time period of 1944 to March 1958.

colors - with the reblog tag, on things with bright rainbow colors

funnier when dead - with the reblog tag, on things that. well. are funnier to sidney now that he's dead.

deathweek - tag for an event lasting from march 28th to april 7th.

Boundaries:

Pretty much anyone can interact, this includes personal accounts and RP blogs from different fandoms. I encourage people to interact with Sidney, in fact.

Asks that treat Sidney as fictional will not be answered, however. Please pretend Sidney is a real person in your ask.

Other:

The typing style I use for him is supposed to look like the way my grandma types. "Old person who barely knows computers/phones" vibe.

#danny phantom rp #roleplay #sidney poindexter

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irishcoyote · 5 months

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Okay so fun fact I'm using Tumblr on a school computer (the only place I have access to it) and my school district has a penchant for blocking websites.

If I straight up disappear for days on end, it is because my school blocked tumblr AGAIN and I have yet to find another way to sneak through a hole in the net.

That is why there was no update to ISOR on Friday the 26th.

I'm saying this because the last time I disappeared from the internet it happened because I was hit by a car and went into a very deep coma (technically a vegetative state but I hate that term). That will not happen again, and even if it does, it would be the most hilarious thing in the world (and I will most definitely perish).

Anyway yeah that's why I might be so inconsistent. Love you, besties.

#irishcoyote

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mariacallous · 10 months

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Around dinner time one night in July, a student in Albuquerque, New Mexico, googled “suicide prevention hotline.” They were automatically blocked. The student tried again, using their Albuquerque Public Schools district–issued laptop to search for "contact methods for suicide." Blocked. They were turned away again a few hours later when attempting to access a webpage on the federally-funded Suicide Prevention Resource Center. More than a dozen times that night, the student tried to access online mental health resources, and the district's web filter blocked their requests for help every time.

In the following weeks, students and staff across Albuquerque tried and failed to reach crisis mental health resources on district computers. An eighth grader googled “suicide hotline” on their take-home laptop, a ninth grader looked up “suicide hotline number,” a high school counselor googled “who is a mandated reporter for suicide in New Mexico,” and another counselor at an elementary school tried to download a PDF of the district’s suicide prevention protocol. Blocked, blocked, blocked—all in a state with among the highest suicide rates in the US.

Thanks in large part to a two-decade-old federal anti-porn law, school districts across the US restrict what students see online using a patchwork of commercial web filters that block vast and often random swathes of the internet. Companies like GoGuardian and Blocksi—the two filters used in Albuquerque—govern students’ internet use in thousands of US school districts. As the national debate over school censorship focuses on controversial book-banning laws, a WIRED investigation reveals how these automated web filters can perpetuate dangerous censorship on an even greater scale.

WIRED requested internet censorship records from 17 public school districts around the US, painting a picture of the widespread digital censorship taking place across the country. Our investigation focuses on Albuquerque Public Schools (APS), one of the largest school districts in the US, which provided the most complete look at its web-filtering systems. APS shared 36 gigabytes of district network logs covering January 2022 to August 21, 2023, offering an unprecedented look at the kinds of content blocked by US schools on a daily basis. Our analysis of more than 117 million censorship records confirms what students and civil rights advocates have long warned: Web filters are preventing kids from finding critical information about their health, identity, and the subjects they’re studying in class.

“It’s just like another form of oppression,” Brooklynn Chavez, a senior at La Cueva High School in northeast Albuquerque, says of the district’s filters. “It’s like an awful kind of feeling.”

It’s a problem that’s not going away. This summer, APS installed Blocksi web filters on all student and staff devices. According to our analysis and interviews with APS staff, the results seemed to be disastrous. During the nearly three months APS used the Blocksi filter, it blocked more than a million network requests a day, on average, including searches for mental and physical health services; words related to LGBTQ+, Black, and Hispanic communities; websites for local youth groups; thousands of student searches for harmless information; and tens of thousands of news articles.

“It will basically shut down your internet,” Shellmarie Harris, director of educational technology at APS, says of Blocksi’s keyword filtering technology. “Kids, teachers will not be able to get into anything.”

APS, which installed Blocksi in May, stopped using the filter on most of its devices in August due to its restrictiveness, Harris says, and returned to the GoGuardian filter it used before the switch. Our investigation raises questions about the appropriateness and implementation of GoGuardian's filter as well.

In May, before the district switched to Blocksi, the GoGuardian filter blocked an eighth grader from searching for “suicide prevention.” It prevented a third grader from searching the word “latina” and a sixth grader from searching “black man.” When an 11th grader googled “Obergefell v. Hodges ruling,” instead of a list of websites with information about the landmark United States Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, the student saw a gray screen with APS’s logo and the message: “Restricted. This website has been blocked by your administrator.”

It is difficult to determine who exactly is responsible for a given content restriction. While APS administrators set the network policy for the entire district, individual teachers can also choose what to filter with GoGuardian—including whether to turn off the internet entirely for a particular student or class during a lesson, according to Harris. Outside of school hours, parents can also use the Blocksi and GoGuardian parent apps that APS provides to set their own restrictions on their kids’ school-issued devices.

Blocksi did not respond to multiple requests for comment or answer detailed questions about censorship of APS web activity.

Jeff Gordon, director of public relations for GoGuardian, tells WIRED, “GoGuardian regularly evaluates our website categorization to ensure, to the best of our ability, that legitimate educational sites are accessible to students by default.” He said more than 7,600 school districts use the company’s web filter and referred all questions about whether the blocked activity in Albuquerque was appropriately censored to the district.

Sithara Subramanian, an 11th grader at La Cueva High School, says she began to run into her school’s GoGuardian filter on a regular basis around the time remote learning ended. “It got kind of intense when we went back to school, like educational websites were being blocked,” Subramanian says. The censorship has been particularly frustrating for her biology and anatomy studies. “It felt like they were trying to restrict our education rather than enhance it.”

“My son says the filters make the internet useless,” Sarah Hooten, the mother of Henry, a 13-year-old former APS student, tells WIRED. Henry says that he couldn’t use YouTube to look up information for a report he was assigned about rainforests. “I know it’s partly to do with blocking kids from doing what they aren’t supposed to be doing,” Henry says. “But it’s also just the school not understanding what they are blocking.”

What Went Wrong

The scale of censorship we found in Albuquerque’s schools shows how web filters can twist seemingly simple decisions to block unwanted online content into policies that render the internet near impossible to use.

In one instance, an APS staff member was unable to view The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize–winning 1619 Project, a historical exploration of slavery and its consequences in the United States, because of an apparently misguided keyword block in the district’s Blocksi filter. The district’s web-filter blocked websites containing the keyword “avery.” This blocked hundreds of attempts to access the website of a printing company, Avery.com, although APS officials could not explain why “avery” was keyword-blocked. But because the URL for the 1619 Project includes the word “slavery,” it was also blocked. So was a Stanford University lecture about slavery, a Wikipedia map of slavery in the United States, and several articles about a controversial Florida curriculum about slavery.

APS records show that keywords on the district blacklist triggered the Blocksi filter nearly 32 million times from May 31 through August 21.

While most of the keywords WIRED reviewed are meant to restrict pornographic content and games, some appear to have unintentionally caused broader restrictions that prevented students from accessing legitimate educational content. A ban on the word “assault,” for example, blocked news articles at least 60 times, including stories from The Atlantic, CNN, and the Associated Press. In total, APS blocked students accessing news websites nearly 40,000 times.

“It’s not the right approach to try and censor information because we are afraid of how they are going to react to it,” Caitlin Vogus, deputy director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press foundation, tells WIRED. “If anyone in our society has a stake in reading about school shootings, it’s the students themselves.”

The banned keywords also show that someone—APS could not say who—blocked access to critical health websites. For example, the websites of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Planned Parenthood were keyword blocked. CDC web pages, including many specifically pertaining to Covid-19, were censored as many as 1,607 times. Planned Parenthood pages were censored more than 50 times in Albuquerque while Blocksi was in use.

APS communications director Monica Armenta tells WIRED that, “to the best of my knowledge,” the district didn’t purposefully block URLs containing “avery” or the websites of the CDC and Planned Parenthood.

“We regularly referred our families and staff to the CDC for guidance on Covid,” Armenta says. “We did not find any issues with students or staff accessing CDC, Planned Parenthood, or ‘avery’ during school hours.” At the time of Armenta’s response, the district was no longer using the Blocksi filter that restricted those websites.

Nearly three-quarters of the blocked activity WIRED examined was not explicitly tied to a keyword, and the data APS provided did not explain why those web pages triggered the district’s filters.

Blocksi says it sorts content into 79 preset categories to make its blocking decisions. Those categories include “alternative beliefs,” “abortion,” “sex education,” “folklore,” and “meaningless content.” School staff can choose which of those categories to block, allow, or block with a warning.

GoGuardian says it uses machine learning algorithms that scan the content and context of a page, rather than just pick out keywords, to decide whether it’s appropriate for students. But WIRED’s analysis of censorship logs from APS raises questions about the effectiveness of GoGuardian’s filter at judging context. For example, between January and August of 2023, the district’s GoGuardian filter blocked more than 1,580 websites with the word “gay” in the URL. While that included domains and URLs that contained sexual content, many did not appear to have any sexual content at all. On May 18, the district’s GoGuardian filter blocked a La Cueva High School 10th grader’s one-word Google search for “gay.”

Harris, Albuquerque’s educational technology director, says the word “gay” shouldn’t have been blocked on its own but might have triggered another rule in the filter. After googling “gay” on her own computer, she speculated that GoGuardian might have blocked the search because the results page includes Google Maps listings for several bars in Albuquerque that cater to LGBTQ+ customers, and the district has chosen to block content related to alcohol on its devices.

GoGuardian’s filter can trigger automatic alerts to school staff about browsing activity. During an interview with WIRED, Harris received a GoGuardian Smart Alert notifying her that a student was looking at potentially dangerous material online. “This poor child is getting targeted because [they searched] ‘how to draw grass,’” Harris says. “And so it’s probably thinking ‘grass’ is marijuana.”

Harris says APS allows staff and students to request that content be unblocked. Several of the students who spoke to WIRED say they wouldn't feel comfortable asking administrators to unblock content.

Tiera Tanksley, a research fellow who studies youth and technology policy at UCLA, tells WIRED that schools need to consider the consequences of over-filtering, especially when technology like GoGuardian’s Smart Alerts automatically notifies adults about what kids are looking at online.

“We have to remember who’s using school-issued devices,” Tanksley says. “It’s already baked in that these are going to be lower income, probably people of color, just because of the economic disparities. Getting flagged multiple times trying to access inappropriate content is opening the door for other types of disciplinary disparities,” she argues.

During the 2022-2023 school year, 66 percent of APS students identified as Hispanic, 20 percent as white, 5 percent as American Indian or Alaskan native, and 3 percent as Black, according to data published by the school district. Nearly 68 percent of the district’s students received free school meals, which is a rough reflection of how many families live near the poverty line and slightly higher than the national average.

Our investigation found that both the Blocksi and GoGuardian filters used by APS censored a wide range of words, websites, and online resources related directly to race and ethnicity. And students who spoke to WIRED say they were frequently blocked while attempting to research historical events that involved racism or violence.

When a 12th grader at the city’s Atrisco Heritage Academy High School tried to ask Google for information about “structural racism black community,” GoGuardian blocked their search, records reviewed by WIRED show. It also nixed a ninth grader’s search for illustrations of Black people, a seventh grader’s search for “pueblo indians,” a fourth grader’s image search for “immigrant,” and a ninth grader’s image search for “el mobimiento [sic] chicano”—the Mexican-American Chicano Movement of the 1960s.

Blocksi’s filters blocked similar search terms, including “how oppressed are black people.” And it blocked hundreds of attempts to access legal information for immigrants at USCIS.gov. On July 27, it prevented an APS staff member from opening the form used to apply for US citizenship online, APS records show.

Chavez, the La Cueva High School senior who leads their school’s Native American Student Union, says the district’s filters have hindered their attempts to research Indigenous heritage and Indigenous protests. ”Because I can’t find information on certain Indigenous topics, I’m wondering about kids who are younger than me, Indigenous kids who are trying to look up their heritage, trying to learn about their heritage,” Chavez says. “It frustrates me because they can’t. It’s not easily accessible, especially during school hours.”

Content related to gender, sexuality, and identity was also blocked across Albuquerque. For instance, the district's web filters prevented six students from visiting pages at the Trevor Project, one of the nation’s leading LGBTQ+ youth advocacy groups. Even the websites of local youth nonprofits, including Together for Brothers and the Southwest Organizing Project, were restricted. Three different middle schoolers, on three different days, searched for “pride flag” and were blocked.

In a statement to WIRED, Casey Pick, director of law & policy for the Trevor Project, characterized APS’s censorship as “dangerous” and “unethical.”

“Blocking content inherently suggests that it’s something that is inappropriate or that people shouldn’t see or know about,” says Josh Block, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who focuses on the civil-liberties-focused nonprofit’s LGBT and HIV Project. “That certainly has a message that reverberates beyond just the computer screen.”

Gordon, the GoGuardian spokesperson, says the company “does not block searches or restrict access to legitimate educational sites by default, nor do we block LGBTQIA+, reproductive health, or racial justice websites by default.”

Web pages belonging to the ACLU were blocked 68 times.

Safety vs. Education

The consequences of school web filtering reach far beyond Albuquerque. Virtually every school in the US uses an automatic web filter, largely due to the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) passed by Congress in 2000. The law requires schools and libraries to block “child pornography” and other content deemed “obscene” or “harmful to minors” in order to be eligible for federal technology aid known as E-rate funding.

In districts like Albuquerque’s, which invested millions to provide take-home computers to students, the filters have increasingly come to govern kids’ online lives both inside and outside of school. Our investigation found that nearly 10 percent of the blocks between January 2022 and August 2023 occurred on weekends.

The filters catch plenty of content that district officials say should legitimately be blocked—some students try to look at porn, many try to play online games during school, and a significant portion of the content blocked by Albuquerque’s filters appears to be pop-ups, advertisements, and spam. Harris says the district has intentionally chosen to block students from accessing generative AI tools; during the three months it was in place, Blocksi prevented more than 41,000 attempts to access ChatGPT.

“There are hundreds of thousands of sites that are being created every day that we don't have the resources to vet and look at all the time,” Harris says. “We do the best with our resources and our stance really is to limit the amount of filtering and teach digital citizenship.”

Since CIPA was first proposed in 1998, critics and supporters alike have raised concerns about the impact of web-filtering technology and the balance between free access to information and safety.

“I am very concerned about censorship,” the law’s primary sponsor, late Arizona Senator John McCain, told The New York Times in February 1998. “But I think we need to act to try and provide some rules, otherwise we may find ourselves in a situation where Americans say, ‘Look, this has got to stop; we are willing to sacrifice some of our civil liberties to protect our children.’”

When it was passed in 2000, CIPA was immediately challenged by the American Library Association and the ACLU, which argued in a series of lawsuits that that the law’s web-filtering requirement placed unconstitutional restrictions on library patrons’ speech. In 2003, the US Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 that government-mandated web filtering was constitutional, in part because libraries allowed patrons to request that specific websites be unblocked.

Students and civil rights groups have continued to fight against web censorship. In 2011, the ACLU launched a “Don’t Filter Me” campaign that encouraged schools to stop using web filters that blocked LGBTQ+ content. The campaign culminated in a 2012 case in which a federal court ordered the school district in Camdenton, Missouri, to stop using a filter that explicitly blocked non-adult LGBTQ+ websites.

In the decade since that ruling, students have consistently complained about school web filters’ allegedly discriminatory blocking patterns. A student in Hawaii claimed his school’s Securly web filter was labeling sites that had “gay” in the domain as pornography. In Park City, Utah, students complained that they were allegedly prevented from searching for words including “gay,” “lesbian,” and “queer.” And in Katy, Texas, student protests and an ACLU complaint last year forced the school district to stop using a web filter with a category that the complaint said had been titled “Alternative Sexual Lifestyles (GLBT) Global” and blocked access to the Trevor Project and other LGBTQ+ support organizations’ websites.

Victories against inaccurate and potentially dangerous web filters are rare. In September, a nationwide survey conducted by the Center for Democracy and Technology found that a majority of students believe their school’s web filter hinders their ability to do schoolwork. In schools with web filters, 71 percent of students agreed that it was sometimes hard to complete school assignments because web filters were blocking access to essential information. The same percentage of students said they’d been blocked from visiting websites they felt they should have been allowed to visit. And LGBTQ+ students reported being blocked from content at higher rates than non-LGBTQ+ students on both questions.

More than half of the teachers who responded to CDT’s survey (57 percent) agreed that their school’s web filters made completing assignments harder. Thirty-seven percent of teachers believed their school’s web filters were more likely to block content associated with LGBTQ+ students, and 32 percent believed the filters were more likely to block content associated with students of color.

Chavez, the senior at La Cueva High School in northeast Albuquerque, says they and many other students at their high school have stopped using their APS-purchased Chromebooks altogether. Instead, they say, students now bring their personal laptops from home to school. But other students say they don’t have that option.

“It totally inhibits me from doing proper research or slows down my whole workflow,” Mateo, a senior at another APS high school who asked that we not use his real name, says of the district’s filters. But his school won’t allow students to bring personal laptops, meaning he has no choice but to use the filtered internet.

“I think it’s kind of redundant and almost offensive,” Mateo says, “that they would try to censor everything to such an obscene degree.”

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999moreyears · 5 months

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school districts will block every website ever, even if used for school but not do anything about the horrible staff or bullying.

#damien talks #BRUH...

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alexmey-does-an-arts · 1 year

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finally went and got a vpn so i can fucking use blocked websites at school. wish i did this earlier tbh

seriously why does my district's wifi block tumblr but not reddit. they deadass blocked their OWN WEBSITE earlier this year but they have never blocked reddit once

#rambles

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idontdrinkgatorade · 7 months

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using a proxy to access blocked websites on school wifi while two district IT guys stand behind me

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ukrainenews · 2 years

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Daily Wrap Up October 13, 2022

(Updates may be sporadic over the weekend, I have family coming into town.)

Under the cut:

The governor of a Russian border region accused Ukraine of shelling an apartment block in Belgorod on Thursday but a Kyiv official said a stray Russian missile was to blame, in only one of a series of apparent strikes on Russian border towns

Moscow has announced it will evacuate Kherson after an appeal from the Russian-installed head of the region, raising fears the occupied city at the heart of the south Ukrainian oblast will become a new frontline.

"Kamikaze" drones carried out attacks targeting infrastructure facilities in the Kyiv region, according the head of the regional police. Three "kamikaze" drones hit the district of Bucha, the head of Kyiv region police Andrii Nebytov said.

Russia has moved strategic bomber planes to the Kola peninsula, about 32 kilometers from the Norwegian border, according to satellite imagery obtained by Faktisk, a Norwegian fact-checking website. The images of the Russian Olenya Air Base on the Kola Peninsula near the Norwegian border show an increased presence of long-range strategic bombers, including Tu-160 and Tu-95.

“The governor of a Russian border region accused Ukraine of shelling an apartment block there [Belgorod] on Thursday but a Kyiv official said a stray Russian missile was to blame, in only one of a series of apparent strikes on Russian border towns.

Vyacheslav Gladkov said a school had been damaged in a village close to the border, and that the top floor of an apartment block had been struck in the city of Belgorod.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter that Russia had launched a missile towards the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv but "something went wrong and it hit (a) residential building".

Video showed rubble next to a 16-storey apartment block with a large rupture near its roof. Reuters could not independently establish who was to blame. Gladkov said no one had been hurt.

Separately, Gladkov said that a border post in the frontier town of Shebekino, which adjoins Ukraine's eastern region of Kharkiv, and an ammunition depot near Belgorod city had been destroyed in Ukrainian strikes. He said that there had been no casualties in either strike.

Video, apparently of the ammunition depot, shared on social media showed a major fire illuminating the night sky.

The governor of another Russian region, Kursk, said an electricity substation had been damaged by a shell, which had knocked out power to two settlements. Reuters was not able to independently verify that report.

Russian investigators said they had opened a criminal case into the shelling of the region and blamed the Ukrainian military. Ukraine's defence ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Russia's border regions have reported sporadic attacks since Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, including on targets such as fuel and ammunition stores. Ukraine has not admitted responsibility, but an official has described previous incidents as "karma" for Moscow's war actions.

The war has killed thousands of Ukrainians and left cities, towns and villages in ruins. Ukraine and its Western allies have accused Russian forces of war crimes and targeting civilians, charges Moscow rejects.”-via Reuters

“Moscow has announced it will evacuate Kherson after an appeal from the Russian-installed head of the region, raising fears the occupied city at the heart of the south Ukrainian oblast will become a new frontline.

Marat Khusnullin, a Russian deputy prime minister, told state television on Thursday that residents would be helped to move away from the region in south Ukraine, which remains only partly occupied by invading troops due to a successful Ukrainian counterattack in recent months.

“The government took the decision to organise assistance for the departure of residents of the [Kherson] region to other regions of the country,” Khusnullin said.

The development followed a public request on the social media platform Telegram by Volodymyr Saldo, a former mayor of the port city, who was installed in April by the Russian forces as head of the wider Kherson region.”-via The Guardian

“"Kamikaze" drones carried out attacks targeting infrastructure facilities in the Kyiv region, according the head of the regional police.

Three "kamikaze" drones hit the district of Bucha, the head of Kyiv region police Andrii Nebytov said.

"Tonight, the enemy carried out a series of attacks on the infrastructure of Kyiv region. As a result of the explosions a fire broke out," he said in a Telegram post on Thursday. There are no casualties, according to a preliminary assessment.

The police chief did not elaborate on what kind of infrastructure facilities were targeted in Bucha.

Drones also struck targets in the Makariv community in the Kyiv region overnight, he said.

Oleksii Kuleba, head of Kyiv region military administration, also posted about the drones on Telegram.

"Today, around 5 am, the Russians carried out an attack on the Kyiv region. In one of the communities of the region, there were three attacks by enemy kamikaze drones on an infrastructure facility. This caused a fire," he said.

"There are no casualties. At 06:45, the fire was localized, there is no open fire. 43 people and 12 units of emergency services equipment were involved in extinguishing the fire," added Kuleba.

He asked residents not to film the location of the attacks or share on social media.

"Do not specify locations and places of incoming hits. Be responsible, because our safety depends on it," Kuleba added.

Some context: Thursday's "kamikaze" drone attacks come after three consecutive days of deadly Russian strikes on civilian targets across Ukraine, including the capital region.”-via CNN

“Russia has moved strategic bomber planes to the Kola peninsula, about 32 kilometers from the Norwegian border, according to satellite imagery obtained by Faktisk, a Norwegian fact-checking website. The images of the Russian Olenya Air Base on the Kola Peninsula near the Norwegian border show an increased presence of long-range strategic bombers, including Tu-160 and Tu-95.

The planes have the capacity to attack targets in the U.S. and all of Europe with nuclear bombs. The planes are usually stationed at Engels Air Base, 720 kilometers southeast of Moscow, Faktisk reports.”-via Kyiv Independent

#Daily Update #Ukraine #Russia #War in Ukraine #kyiv #Norway #kherson #Belgorod

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kammartinez · 1 year

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When Roxy Music was recording “Street Life” for the 1973 album Stranded, they hung a mic out the window of AIR Studios above Oxford Street, but they didn’t like the results and they ended up mixing in the sounds of a Moroccan market instead. As “Street Life” begins, we hear traffic amid four haunting chords and a shimmering hi-hat rhythm, and then Bryan Ferry belts out that he wishes everyone would leave him alone. He goes out for a walk. “Each verse seems to have its own character,” he later said, “like blocks on a street.” A fan since my youth of early Roxy Music, I still hear that song’s ethereal city vibe when I, too, wish everyone would leave me alone and, like Bryan, hit the streets.

If I go left, heading into what I think of as downtown Echo Park, I glimpse the green folds of the Angeles Crest as I pass Craftsman and Victorian houses and courtyard bungalows. I turn onto Sunset Boulevard, passing barber shops, burger stands, bookstores, and botanicas. I can get my knives sharpened and my shoes repaired, shop for groceries, eat eighty different kinds of food. The streets are full of people of all kinds, even as Echo Park comes twentieth in a walkability ranking of L.A. neighborhoods, according to some website. MacArthur Park, which is more population-dense than parts of Manhattan, ranks higher, as does Hollywood. But here I have the option of avoiding commerce by going three blocks north to the park, where I can walk miles of shaded trails. Or stroll my little residential enclave, where people are sitting on their stoops, a guy is working on his ’68 Camaro, trees are heavy with citrus, softball-size dragon fruits shine redly through a fence. I can walk to Echo Park Lake, due west, entirely through an alleyway, where among overgrown fig trees and sidewalk pulverized to dirt you might think you were in some Mississippi backwater Barry Hannah was describing, but you’re parallel and just behind Sunset. At the lakefront are picnickers, food carts, fishermen creating what my son refers to as “pressure on the lake.” One day I watch a guy and girl furtively produce a pristine white duck from a knapsack and release it. They’ve clearly just bought the thing at a live-poultry shop and are trying to rewild it among the mallards and grebes, but the mission seems also to be a form of courtship.

On these walks, minutes from home, I am certain that Los Angeles, which I moved to from New York twenty years ago, is the most beautiful city in the world (and yes, I have seen the world). But that’s only if I go west or north or south. If I head east, toward downtown, 1.5 miles away, my booster talk ebbs. It’s freeway overpasses, empty lots, and fortress-like buildings, a dead zone.

I should be able to walk to the opera house, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad, the Bradbury Building, or City Hall, to the grand old theaters on Main Street, the jewelry district, Union Station. To Philippe the Original on Alameda, a hundred-year-old deli where undertakers from the nearby mortuaries park their hearses and stop in for a sandwich. To the new Frank Gehry building on Grand, across from my son’s music school. (Late in life, Gehry now seems to believe in design that prioritizes not postmodern showiness but plazas and shade and places for the passerby to sit.) But to get to the pedestrian-friendly world downtown involves several blocks of monolithic residential architecture along freeways, all by the same developer, inward-facing buildings with dark and empty storefronts, bunker parking, and sky bridges. The tenants of these places don’t have to ever step foot on the street. I’ve heard they are mostly USC students, but you don’t see them. The only people I might encounter are unhoused individuals, and those in this particular area often appear to be in severe mental crisis, as they linger beyond buildings that are as obdurate and closed as medieval armories.

Dubbed the Renaissance Collection, these buildings form a plaque that separates the people of Echo Park from downtown L.A. They were built by Geoffrey Palmer, a little man who resembles a ventriloquist’s dummy and is gifted at making enemies. Palmer buys up forlorn and odd plots alongside freeways, where he builds his “Italianate” developments, as Italian as leatherette is leather, but less charming. In 1973, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark purchased random little slices of land around New York City for a conceptual art project he titled Fake Estates. Perhaps the unsavory parcels that Palmer acquires would remain similarly conceptual were it not for the very real fake estates he builds on them. This is his own defense—that he’s building where no one else dares—but he seems to take almost libidinal satisfaction in perching rows of apartment balconies over the 110–101 freeway interchange. The off-white stucco exteriors of his buildings are coated with soot within days of completion. In 2003, he illegally bulldozed the last Victorian of Bunker Hill while building the Orsini, a few blocks from my house. Palmer is vehemently opposed to affordable housing and has spent tens of millions on lawsuits and ballot measures to ensure that he won’t have to build any. He recently settled a class-action suit over systematically keeping tenants’ security deposits. One of Trump’s biggest donors, he has bragged that his company hasn’t paid federal taxes in thirty years. In the fall of 2014, a fire was deliberately started in Palmer’s half-built and wood-framed Da Vinci, a block down from the Orsini. Flames shot higher than many buildings downtown, stretched a city block, melted freeway signs, and cracked one hundred and sixty windows in the iconic John Ferraro Building, headquarters of Water and Power. The consensus among architects, residents, and journalists was that almost anyone could have started the fire, given how many people hate Palmer. City commissioners joked, in a planning meeting, that they sure hoped everyone present had an alibi. The city sued Palmer for the reckless conditions that allowed the blaze to grow so large. The person who started it was caught and sentenced to prison. He supposedly did it for Michael Brown, to protest the police killings of unarmed black men. No one was hurt. The Da Vinci was promptly rebuilt.

“Why is Everything So Ugly?” wondered a recent editorial in n+1. The editors structured their thoughts on the subject around a Situationist-style dérive they take through New York City. They begin by pondering a new condominium tower limply called the Josh, which has been erected in place of a recently demolished hundred-year-old building. The Josh, they tell us, is made of plastic, concrete, and “an obscure wood-like substance”—materials that have been chosen not for quality and beauty but on the basis of global supply-chain availability, a cookie-cutter design review process, and a cost-saving preference for semi-skilled labor. The Josh is already looking shabby at five months old. When it rains, its façade gets “conspicuously . . . wet.” Their dérive continues past more than one Bank of America, alongside a vape shop, and into a theater, where a shitty franchise based on a TV show of a comic book is playing. After the movie, there’s a run-in with blindingly bright LED lights, resulting in a visit to urgent care.

Google reveals that the building the editors are calling the Josh is actually the Greenpoint—located, as you might guess, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—but the Josh does more work to illustrate certain ideas than the real name might. I think I know eighteen Joshes. No offense to any of them; I too have a common name and would wager the Josh could have been called the Rachel in the blink of an eye. Still, the Josh has a certain sound when isolated as a branding mechanism, with its soft landing into sshh, whether put to service selling wine or machines for living. I chuckled about the Josh. It, or he, made me think of that guy Tom from MySpace, everyone’s first friend. I imagined Tom living at the Josh, enjoying an industrial salad at a particle-board table. But names are merely symptoms. They are not the cause of “the violence of the new ugliness” that the n+1 editors ponder. Branding arises from standardization. If the things that are made are more or less the same, difference itself must be manufactured.

The Situationists first began undertaking their dérives—which means to drift, to walk without a fixed plan—in response to a rail strike. Guy Debord and others tumbled drunkenly through the night, walking or hitchhiking, and found that the new routes they forged promised a change of orientation, a new outlook. In Debord’s autobiographical Panegyric, at a point in his life when he had lost hope in the city and headed for the hills, he regrets that a “flood of destruction, pollution, and falsification had conquered the whole surface of the planet, as well as pouring down nearly to its very depths.” (Had Debord, too, noticed how wet the Josh was looking?) Five years later he shot himself in the heart. It wasn’t just that everything was ugly and the revolution stalled, if not foreclosed. Alcohol had done him in.

I decided, on a recent afternoon, to conduct my own dérive, straight into the morass between my street and downtown. I left the house, took a right, another right, and then a left over the 101 freeway. If this overpass could talk, I thought. It might tell of the many women and the many nights of flinty bargains with men in cars. By daylight, it was empty. I turned left onto Temple Street, passing a hotel that abuts the 101, and a sun-blasted bus stop where my kid was let off in grade school, and from which he began conducting his own dérives. This block of Temple has a bakery, a liquor store, and until recently, D’Bongo Party Supplies, then falls into a post-human stretch: there is a tow yard, a recycling center, a cul de sac against the freeway where there was a tent encampment until it burned, and a huge and empty bus yard. That’s all on one side of the street. On the other is the massive retaining wall of a high school baseball diamond. The reason there is open land here, greenery, even if it’s chemically treated monograss beyond chain-link, is that this was an oil field, and it isn’t safe to put up buildings. (What look like lampposts around the field are actually vents that allow methane gases to escape.)

Beyond the baseball/methane field, I pass our own version of the Josh, but it’s called the Charlie. The Charlie is new. There used to be an auto repair and car wash here that was run by a family. Now there is a narrow eight-story building in “space gray” with a gaggle of red real estate balloons bobbing on the wind. I have driven past at night. The units are dark, while the Charlie’s eight-story “parking podium” glows meanly, prison-bright.

From the Charlie I cross the street toward a new Palmer monstrosity on a ten-acre site that used to be a Bank of America data center. Construction is not yet finished. The invasive palms that have been chosen as Palmer’s signature “lush Mediterranean landscaping” have just been trucked in and still have their fronds gathered into ponytails. Even with their fronds let down, they will provide no shade. There’s a giant piss-elegant fountain but it’s dry. now renting 2 months free + free parking, a big sign says. The name of this new addition to Palmer’s suite of Italianate freeway rentals is the Ferrante. Maybe the name came from his wife, a Parisian who seems a little more cultured than he is. Perhaps she’s a fan of Elena Ferrante’s books. I have no proof. I’m guessing.

We’ve been told for years now that Elena Ferrante is a fiction, a made-up name, like Tom, or the Josh. But someone is of course writing those books. Whoever they are, they’re talented, but the insistence on anonymity is starting to seem a little showy, even a bit tacky, if not as tacky as the Ferrante and its 1,150 units. I pass its blank row of street-level commercial spaces. Palmer won’t even try to rent them out. And apparently there’s no fine for leaving them empty. As an architect explained to me, he doesn’t build that income into his plans. Why should a developer care if there is street life? I turn left and walk under a highway overpass and approach the rangy back edge of our neighborhood CVS. What does CVS stand for? No one seems to know. Everything you might want to buy there is now locked up, and you have to press what feels like a panic button to get access to the shelves.

I cross through the parking lot, past a weird machine with a tower on it, flashing a blue light. This is some kind of automated security apparatus, but I’m not sure how it works. A barefoot boy asks me for a light. I don’t have one, I tell him.

Remember how outraged everyone was to discover that the author JT LeRoy, supposedly an ethereal rent boy/lot lizard, was actually a middle-aged woman? They acted like this was the ultimate con, something ugly and counterfeit masquerading as something genuine and tragic and hot. Meanwhile, Elena Ferrante is purporting to be a middle-aged woman. What if she’s a teen boy turning tricks in parking lots? I think, as I turn out of the lot and go right on Sunset.

I walk toward Palmer’s Orsini, which lines both sides of the street, all of its commercial space dark and empty and locked. There is no one here except one man in rags setting bits of trash on fire on the sidewalk. Is it Palmer’s fault that people are setting things on fire? It’s more complicated than that. But with no street activity, people act out. Or, their actions are starker, and less muted by a variety of people and vibrancies that a healthy street should reflect. At the end of this very long, sterile block is one other person, a young woman. Her arms are covered with injection scars. She seems not to notice me. She’s in a kind of Sisyphean struggle, attempting to push an e-scooter that is not activated, its wheels on lock.

The next day I drive back down this street, heading to pick up my son from music school. I spot the woman who tried to push the scooter. She’s still here, as if this bleak zone were her proving ground. Her shirt is off now, and she is throwing her half-clothed body against the brick exterior of the Orsini. But the building is constructed not to feel her, the street not to see her, and I barely see her myself, because my light is green.

While parts of the designed world might be ugly at any speed, it is only the slowness of traveling on foot that causes true discomfiture, by forcing a walker to behold, worry over, brood upon, those to whom this ugliness shouts loudest.

#essays

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alex-rambles · 1 year

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You were locked in your basement?? Btw, if you do move, perhaps hide your phone in like your clothes or pocket as you’re wearing them. Trust me, it’s easy and they won’t suspect to look through the clothes you’re wearing and if you have to change clothes or whatever, just hide your phone again in the current clothes you’re wearing or even inside of your shoe. If you have a binder, it’s perfect to hide your phone inside of there.

This is a very long post that I made to explain my situation + it's a vent

Nonono not locked. I just meant my parents made me be down there with them. Yeah no when I said "trapped in my basement" I just meant with my family cuz the tornado sirens were going off don't worry. It was just kinda annoying.

I appreciate the help, but my secret device is actually a tablet they got me a year ago, and FORGOT PARENTAL CONTROLS, because my stepdad was setting it up and he is not familiar with the type of tablet it is. They thought they threw it away (I had two of em. One was much more monitored because it was from when I was little. They are just these Amazon Fire Tablets, and they thought they threw both of em away, because when they were cleaning out the closet they couldn't find it, and just assumed they threw it away earlier. I got lucky).

Lucky for me, it was actually in my room. The one my stepdad set up. The unmonitored one where I can browse the internet as I please and check out whatever website I want. The only thing was that I couldn't download any apps I didn't already have, as my mom would get a notification because of how the Amazon App Store worked.

I can probably put it in a backpack, but the wifi would have to change and they'd probably notice the tablet on the plan or whatever, and the tablet doesn't use cellular data.

My actual PHONE is monitored. It's an android with this silly google family link thing on it, and my parents (technically my stepdad, he's the one in control) can easily go into the app on THEIR phones, and check my screen time, and every app I have on it (and I can't even download an app without my stepdads permission. If I try to get an apk from the internet and install it, the thing blocks it), as well as what websites I've gone too recently.

HOWEVER, on the subject of checking websites, they can only see what websites I browse on google chrome. My phone came with another Samsung Internet browser, and on THAT, I can open an incognito tab (dubbed Secret Mode). But I have to be sparing with that because my parents will notice I was using Samsung Internet a lot if I use it too much, and then whoops, that'll get monitored too.

So basically, if we move, I lose what is basically my only lifeline, the only reason I'm politically aware, and the only resources I have as a trans person (my parents have offered groups, but I'm too socially awkward. I absolutely prefer face-to-face communication, yes, but with people I know, thanks. If I don't know you, let's just chat through Tumblr or QuoteV, yeah?). That's a problem.

But it's fine, we live in an expensive area because we got lucky when we moved in two years ago. And they said they will only move if we can stay in the same school district. So, fingers crossed, everything is too expensive. Lots of houses going up for sale around here, but they're all too expensive or not the conditions my parents want or need.

TLDR I already have a monitored phone, my secret device is a tablet, my parents never allowed me on social media because 'it's not safe' and they think I can't take care of myself, and if we move I lose the social media because of needing to switch wifi, which is big bad because it has been supporting me and keeping me entertained

#looooooong post #seriously this is the longest non-fanfic post I've ever made

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deltaruminations · 2 years

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7 and 10 for Alphys?

thank you!!!

7 ended up being like. a short improvisational fic. i didn't intend for that to happen but. it did lol. so i'm putting it under a cut because lemgth

7 - food/cooking

she had a friend for a while, not too memorable as a person, apparently, since even his name evades her now, but she remembers he liked to take her places, interrupting her weekend staycations to drag her off to the light rail station and into the City, the terribly big City with its too-cool bourgeois bars and loud, crowded basement shows and crosswalks crawling with humans and monsters who wore and walked a swagger that made her feel infinitesimal in her already diminutive frame. her friend (what’d he look like, again? tall?), tall and cosmopolitan amidst the chaos, seemed oddly at ease there, radiating a patient peace from his palm into hers as he coaxed her along, pointing out curiosities as they walked — historical-place plaques, architectural oddities, trees in funny shapes.

she had to admit it was fun once she’d shivered off the overwhelm, and she quickly found her favorite spots: the central library, the biggest she’d seen since her grad school days, where they’d pick through heavy textbooks and study antique maps with subdued glee; Third Thursdays after-hours at the science museum, where they’d grab grown-up drinks and indulge their inner kids with planetarium shows and ancient bones, riding the earthquake simulator as many times as they could stand; the two-story Japanese bookstore, where she’d pull him around manga shelves and chatter about Mew Mew and Hacksaw Guy and Horodehoro, where he’d read her snippets of poetry from the untranslated books and share in her awe at the Perfect Grade Fundams her schoolteacher salary could never justify buying; and, of course, the Ramen Shop, tucked under a faded awning in an alley a few blocks away, that dished out fragrant bowls of springy noodles entirely unlike the drab instant cups of her day-to-day. the best trips always included a dip into sticky tonkotsu or bright yuzu shio and cups of sake, cloudy-sweet or dark and mushroom-dank, as she relayed the funnier stories of failed experiments from her university lab, her friend (the smile. right. the smile.) flashing crooked grins between sips.

it's been years since her friend seemingly vanished, taking with him the City trips and, most tragically, the Ramen Shop. she finally decides to try it on her own, stepping out shakily onto the International District platform, only to find herself rocked again by the bustle of it all, lacking reinforcement and convinced she’ll crumble. she huddles on a bench until her brain stops buzzing and some semblance of strength returns to her knees, and then she books it onto the next train to Hometown, looking up instant ramen hacks on her phone to pass the time, to imagine something filling the aching emptiness suddenly groaning below her chest.

she browses blankly through college recipe blogs and listicles before something catches her eye: How to Make Perfect Tonkotsu at Home, from a website claiming brazenly the seriousness of its eats, and indeed the article is obsessive – scientific, even – in its approach. the author tests and documents, comparing cuts of bone for optimal yields of collagen, gelatin, and fats, boiling spaghetti in alkaline solutions to replicate the texture of authentic noodles, charting the moisture loss of pork belly under various cooking methods, even cooking bagged slices in a precise bain-marie and finishing them perfectly Maillard with a blowtorch. a freaking blowtorch!

so enthralled is she by methodology that she hardly thinks twice before exiting at an early stop, Awaytown, home to Hometown's nearest full-sized supermarket, through which she winds with laser focus and fills a basket with things she’s never before thought to buy. who knew they sold bags of pork trotters in the same aisle as the frozen dumplings?

it isn’t until she’s in her little apartment kitchen, looking over the ingredients occupying every inch of counter space, that she remembers she’s never cooked anything in her life more advanced than jarred sauce over pasta, and again comes the quake.

she steels herself this time, hugging her arms around her chest, trying her best to think calmly through the steps before her. first, blanch and clean the bones…

the bones. she squeezes her sides, reminded of her ribs, her spine, her structure rattling inside while still retaining her shape.

“Impressive seismic engineering,” he said, gently shaking her shoulder as they wobbled off the simulation. “Strong material, to start. Counteractive damping. Fluid sockets for shock absorption and shearing. We are not all so durable or flexible, you know.”

She laughed. “I’m surprised they even let you on that thing.”

“I suppose they leave such concerns to the waiver,” he replied through an impish smile, removing his hand from her shoulder before reattaching it, nonchalantly, to his other arm.

…he did what? that can’t be right. brains find strange ways to fill in gaps.

what was she doing, again? she glances at the article open on her phone. a new experiment. that’s right. she rolls up her sleeves with trembling hands and sets herself to work.

10 - sleep

she’s been a bad sleeper since she was a kid, thrashing and mumbling frantically, kicking her parents while sleeping between them, scaring the shit out of superstitious kids at summer camp, getting chewed out by dorm-mates for making so much noise the night before finals.

she hardly has nightmares, far as she can tell upon waking. it doesn't work like the familiar anxiety of the light, the stumbling, jumbled-up thoughts, the catastrophic ideation and trembling prey-animal flush.

the fear in the dark is a more primal possessor, fearful and dumb and unable to express itself except through whimpers and the clumsy puppeting of limbs. it has no words to describe itself, no images it can present to her. it hides deep in her gut, her muscles, her throat, biding time for dreams to distract her mind before it tries to claw its way out.*

the first morning she wakes up with undyne is the first morning in years that she wakes up rested, the bedsheets untangled, her palms dry of clammy sweats, the demon in her seemingly eased by the gentle squeeze of powerful arms, the warm lips against her shoulder, the deep, rhythmic push of the breathing body against her back. as she nestles into calming compression, she feels the tickle of an idea.

i bet she'd love the Ramen Shop.

*this is about somaticized complex stress to be clear LMAO she's not actually possessed by chara undertale or whatever. ok

#headcanon zone #got an 8 for ralsei coming up. soon ?

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cyarskj1899 · 2 years

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Thank God!

NEWS

No, Jennifer Lopez Is Not Actually Doing A Whitney Houston Tribute Performance

Contrary to the rumors, the Grammys will not see Jennifer Lopez paying tribute to Whitney Houston.

by Kui Mwai

Today

According to The Grape Juice, the 53-year-old made headlines after a tweet claiming that she was set to do a Houston tribute went viral.

“J.Lo just revealed with @TIME that she is doing a Whitney Houston tribute at the @Grammys next year,” the since-deleted tweet read.

It also claimed that Lopez said “Whitney’s songs fit my vocal range very well” and that she was planning on singing “‘I Have Nothing’ and ‘I Will Always Love You,'” the post stated.

The news set the internet ablaze, with many unimpressed with the decision to elect the “Jenny From the Block” singer to pay homage to Houston.

“Jlo wanting to pay tribute to whitney like ok girl,” one Houston fan tweeted.

“Annnnnd what the f**k is JLO supposed to do with a Whitney Houston song except have an aneurysm???” added another.

Those tweets are among thousands of others questioning Lopez’s ability to cover Houston’s beloved discography.

Supporting rumors of Lopez’s Grammy performance, a clip of “raw audio” of the singer rehearsing for the tribute made it’s way to Twitter. It garnered tens of thousands of views.

Despite the evidence, Lauren Schwartz, a representative for Lopez, confirmed that Lopez is not slated to perform a tribute to Houston.

“There is no truth to this rumor and that interview did not happen,” Schwartz told The Associated Press.

Schwartz added that they’re “looking into” the audio clip, “but either way it is not related to any Grammy performance.” The clip has actually been making the rounds on social media since at least 2010, and has also been used to show Lopez attempting to sing a Barbra Streisand song. The lyrics included in the video are from the Streisand and Donna Summer song “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough),” and not any hits by Houston.

There’s no proof of the interview on Time’s website, and the Grammys has yet to announce its performers for next year’s award show.READ COMMENTS

Nivea On Leveling Up On Your Love Life | Asking For A Friend | Blavity

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Nivea On Leveling Up On Your Love Life | Asking For A Friend | Blavity

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Nivea speaks on syncing up your self work and self love, pre-sex prayer, reconnecting with the earth, and the health benefits of honesty. Watch 21Ninety's Asking For A Friend for more! | Blavity