#alumni website

[514hockey]

My boyfriend’s got the Islanders-Oilers game playing in the background so I keep hearing Romanov’s name and I MISS HIM SO MUCH

[whoslaurapalmer]

alumni email: join this zoom event to find out all about our alumni clubs!!

me: ......so this is a meeting that could literally be an email, that's what you're saying

[heritageposts]

The website of the Columbia Law Review, one of the oldest and most prestigious legal journals in the country, has been down since Monday. At the time of this broadcast, ColumbiaLawReview.org shows a static homepage informing visitors that the site is “under maintenance.” Well, that’s not exactly true. In a stunning move, the board of directors of the Columbia Law Review decided to take down the website after the publication’s student editors refused the board’s request to halt the publication of an academic article written by Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” Student editors at the Columbia Law Review say they were pressured by the journal’s board of directors to halt publication of the piece. They refused the request and published the piece online Monday morning. In response, the board, which is made up of faculty and alumni from Columbia University’s law school, shut down the law review’s website. After the website was taken down, student editors uploaded the article to a publicly accessible website, where it’s gone viral. The article begins, “The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination. This Article introduces Nakba as a legal concept to resolve this tension,” unquote. The article is written by Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights lawyer completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School. Last November, the Harvard Law Review refused to publish a similar, shorter article it had solicited from Rabea, even after it was initially accepted, fully edited and fact-checked. In both cases, the article would have been the first time that either the Harvard Law Review or the Columbia Law Review had ever published a Palestinian legal scholar.

The video interview with Eghbariah, a transcript of the interview, and a full copy of the censored article, can be found on Democracy Now (5th of June, 2024).

Here's also a direct link to Eghbariah's article:

“Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept”

[9jacompass]

Apply Now: Erasmus Mundus Master’s Scholarship in Journalism, Media and Globalisation 2023

Apply Now: Erasmus Mundus Master’s Scholarship in Journalism, Media and Globalisation 2023

Are you currently an undergraduate student in the field of Journalism, Media and Globalisation? Are you passionate about taking your studies to a new level by enrolling for a master’s studies abroad? Then take advantage of and apply for the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Scholarship in Journalism 2023. Applicants can apply for admission to the Mundus Journalism programme and for a Mundus scholarship…

[transpondster]

Above: Google's new AI Overview search result when asked which US Presidents attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The correct answer would, of course, be "None". But Google's AI Overview knows better than to be correct.

Below: The text on a web page of the UW-M website that lists the names of alumni who shared their names with various US Presidents, which Google AI decided was a verified list of actual Presidents who attended the school. Anyone teaching high school or college over the next decade is bound to see some amazing 'facts' in the papers and tests their students turn in after relying on Google as a research tool.

Here's another example, a search that simply reads, "Cheese not sticking to pizza". No telling where Google pulled the advice to add glue to the pizza sauce.

And another Google AI search that says you should eat one small rock a day, taken from The Onion but offered as a real answer to the question.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Keeley at NCRM:

Drag queens unite! Drag PAC is looking to challenge anti-trans laws and drag bans around the country.

It was founded by a number of RuPaul’s Drag Race alums, including Willam Belli, Jinkx Monsoon, Miss Peppermint, Monét X Change and BenDeLaCreme, as well as Dylan Bulkeley-Krane, according to The Hill and KFOX-TV. Bulkeley-Krane previously co-founded Disability Action for America, a PAC dedicated to disability rights. Drag PAC announced its existence Wednesday in a new YouTube video, where the queens involved spoke about why they were driven to found it. [...] The queens say that Drag PAC is the first PAC to be led by drag performers. The goal is to “motivate the LGBTQ+ voter base to create a community of empowered and informed citizens that participate in the democratic process, amplifying the values and issues that affect them as unique but equal American citizens,” according to the PAC’s YouTube page. Right now, the PAC’s website is sparse, with the YouTube video, plus links to register to vote and to donate. The PAC has so far raised $15,000 from individuals, according to Open Secrets.

A first in drag politics: drag performer-led Drag PAC is being formed to fight for drag rights as a result of the anti-drag extremism enacted by right-wing government entities, such as drag bans.

The right-wing war on drag is part of the broader war on LGBTQ+ rights and gender nonconforming expressions in public.

See Also:

LGBTQ Nation: “Drag Race” alumni form historic first-ever PAC led by famous queens

[fdelopera]

Exactly, Anon. Exactly. This is why the Ivy League Universities being turned into Hamasnik terrorist bases is so horrifying. Especially with Jew-hating students attacking Jewish students and professors on campus, with the Universities' sanction. The Universities could shut these Jew-hate riots down. The fact that they don't shows that they want them to continue. They're trying to chase away the Jewish students and professors from these schools. That's always the first step. That's what the Nazis did first, too.

This article is taken from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website. I highly recommend that everyone read the whole article. But even if you read the first paragraph, you'll see the parallels to what is happening on Ivy League campuses today:

.

After Adolf Hitler was appointed German Chancellor in January 1933, the new Nazi government began an effort to completely reorder public and private life in Germany. 

The Nazi regime quickly targeted German universities—among the most elite in the world at the time—for restructuring according to Nazi principles. While the Nazi Ministry of Education initiated reforms, local Nazi organizations and student activists worked to bring Nazi ideals to German campuses. These forces, along with increasing antisemitism under Nazi rule, transformed everyday life at German universities. Throughout this period, students, faculty, and staff made individual decisions that both upheld and opposed Nazi ideology.

With the passage of the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" in 1933, most Jewish professors in Germany were dismissed from their positions. Others, such as Professor Eugen Mittwoch, were able to keep their posts temporarily only due to the political value of their research. After purging Jewish and "politically undesirable" faculty, the regime then targeted the student body with the "Law Against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities." As German authorities continued to "Aryanize" German universities, Jews increasingly lost the opportunity to teach or study. Many non-Jewish Germans sought to benefit from their persecution. 

The daily business of university life continued in the wake of these new policies, but political concerns increasingly influenced the way professors and students worked and studied. The practice of denunciation, as demonstrated by the "Request for the Investigation of Professor Hans Peters," illustrates the danger posed to both students and faculty if they failed to follow new ideological norms. Those willing to voice support for the new regime—whether out of enthusiasm or practicality—often received promotions or other rewards. Meanwhile, many others quietly accepted the new policies and passively benefited from the persecution of their Jewish peers. Very few, such as the small student group in Munich known as the White Rose, took any significant action to resist the Nazi dictatorship.

The Nazi government and its supporters manipulated several aspects of the country's traditional university system to turn German higher education into a crucial source of support for the new regime. For example, the German student population had been largely male long before the Nazi rise to power, and German campuses were dominated by fraternities.  Those organizations maintained traditional military discipline and dress codes, and their alumni groups exercised significant political power both before and after 1933. Fraternities—often working with the Student Council and Nazi Student League—served  as a powerful and violent force for implementing Nazi principles at universities, often going beyond the party platform in their radicalism. A Report on the Camaraderie House for Female Students of Göttingen shows how Nazi student groups used the format of traditional student organizations to train both men and women to become the next generation of Nazi leaders.

Although the regime could rely on many committed student activists, the Third Reich also sought the support of German professors to lend legitimacy to their policies. Because German universities were state institutions, professors' academic careers became vulnerable to the whims and wishes of the Nazi state. While only a small minority of professors had been Nazi Party members before 1933, several prominent professors quickly voiced their support for the Third Reich. In the new German university, political loyalty was valued over academic ability in the assessment of students and in the selection and promotion of professors. Authorities infused university classrooms with Nazi ideology—as shown in the document, "Foundation of the Advanced School of the German Reich". But prioritizing politics over academics affected the quality of German higher education. 

Nevertheless, professors—even enthusiastic supporters of the new regime—often spoke out against some aspects of Nazi policy. The case of Eduard Kohlrausch shows how his opposition to  student-led book burnings caused his removal from the university administration. Dissent against individual policies, however, did not give rise to any concerted resistance movements. German universities as a whole formed a solid base of support for the Nazi regime, contributing valuable knowledge to the development of technology for the war effort as well as logistical support for the Holocaust.

The Nazification of universities overwhelmed the daily lives of students with new requirements, including mandatory lectures, physical exercises, labor duties, and political assemblies. Many students resented those requirements, even if they supported the Nazi Party. In Heidelberg, for example, where the daily life of students was dominated by political instruction and mandatory physical training, large numbers of students withdrew from the university in search of other educational opportunities. As illustrated in the "Memo Regarding Maria-Elisabeth Koch," students also showed varying degrees of enthusiasm for the labor service that was often required of them in territories occupied by Nazi Germany.

The Nazi government's project of remaking German universities was broadly successful, but it produced unintended consequences. The quality of education suffered significantly as classes were regularly cancelled for political assemblies and students' schedules became filled with ideological and paramilitary training. Moreover, purging Jewish faculty deprived German universities of valuable expertise. Within a few years, many observers in Germany and abroad became deeply skeptical about the quality of German higher education in the Third Reich. Propaganda efforts such as the Carl Schurz tour for American professors and students—documented with a slickly produced video—did not prevent protest. The 550th-anniversary celebration of Heidelberg University met with opposition in Europe, even while prominent American universities such as Harvard accepted invitations.

With the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, Allied forces occupying Germany began a long-term effort to remove the influence of Nazi ideology in German society. Many German academics who made significant contributions to the Nazi war effort fled to the United States, where they lived comfortable lives and their expertise was highly valued by American universities and the US military. In postwar Germany, many faculty and students who had benefited from the Nazis' discriminatory policies without being especially vocal or enthusiastic supporters of the regime sought to cast their dissent or their silence as forms of political resistance to obscure their own complicity. Although many Germans denied having supported the Nazi regime, antisemitism persisted in postwar Germany. The case of Hermann Budzislawski shows the difficulties encountered by the relatively few German Jews who decided to return to Germany after World War II.

Sources in this collection document the choices facing students and faculty pursuing their everyday lives in the shadow of Nazism and the Holocaust. Over the course of this period, as antisemitic discrimination escalated to mass murder, the higher education system proved to be a source of support—rather than opposition—to the party's project of remaking German society.

[memecucker]

Student editors at the Columbia Law Review say they were pressured by the journal’s board of directors to halt publication of an academic article written by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and upholding an apartheid regime.

When the editors refused the request and published the piece Monday morning, the board — made up of faculty and alumni from Columbia University’s law school — shut down the law review’s website entirely. It remained offline Tuesday evening, a static homepage informing visitors the domain “is under maintenance.”

The episode at one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious legal journals marks the latest flashpoint in an ongoing debate about academic speech that has deeply divided students, staff and college administrators since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

[audiodramayearbook]

Audio Drama Yearbook, Class of 2023

What even is this?

The Audio Drama Yearbook is a listener-submitted, completely non-definitive collection of audio drama podcasts, plus Most Likely Awards, including shows aired this year as the Class of 2023, and previously-aired shows as alumni.

How does it work?

Anyone can submit a show to the yearbook. Just fill out the linked form.

Yearbook submissions will be open from January 1 - January 31, 2024

Anyone can also nominate for the Most Likely Awards, featuring categories for Shows, Actors, Writers, Characters, & Editors/Sound Designers.

Nominations will be open from January 1 - January 15, 2024.More about the awards can be found here.

Stuff gets submitted & nominated, then what?

Every show submitted to the Yearbook will be included, complete with quote and link to homepage or feed.

For the Most Likelys, after the nomination period closes, the results will be tallied up. The top four show/actor/creator/candidates will move on to the voting phase, conducted via Tumblr poll on this account.

How does voting work?

Voting will be done via Tumblr poll, over the course of the week of January 29 - February 2, 2024. The polls for one category will be posted each day. (Voting dates updated!!)

What do they win?

The winners get a dedicated page in the 2023 yearbook, and bragging rights!

The yearbook itself will be available on the website and as a downloadable PDF in mid-February, 2024.

[sailorfailures]

PGSM 20 Year Reunion Event!!

This is not a drill!! The five Sailor Guardians from Toei's 2003 live action adaptation of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon will be officially reuniting under the series's title for the show's 20-year anniversary on Christmas Day, 2023!

The five actresses - Miyuu Sawai (Moon), Rika Izumi (Mercury), Keiko Kitagawa (Mars), Mew Azama (Jupiter), and Ayaka Komatsu (Venus) - have each posted about the upcoming event on their social media, but the official Sailor Moon franchise website has posted this announcement:

2003年から2004年まで放送された、ドラマ『美少女戦士セーラームーン』。 その20周年を記念した特番「セーラー戦士 同窓会」の放送が決定しました！ドラマ『美少女戦士セーラームーン』を制作したCBCテレビ（愛知・岐阜・三重）で2023年12月25日（月）に放送予定です。 オーディションにおける裏話や中高生時代の5人が仲を深めるきっかけになった撮影秘話など、今だからこそ話せるお互いの関係性にまつわるエピソードが満載のトークバラエティ番組になっています。 放送情報などの詳細は後日発表いたします。続報をお楽しみに。 The TV drama "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon" aired from 2003 to 2004. To commemorate that 20 year anniversary, there will be a special program broadcast: "Sailor Guardian Alumni Reunion"! The program is scheduled to be broadcast on Monday, December 25, 2023 on the station which produced the Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon drama series, CBC Television [Aichi | Gifu | Mie]. The episode is set to be a talk variety show covering behind-the-scenes conversations about the show's auditions, filming secrets about what sparked deeper friendships amongst the five then-middle and high-school-aged girls, and tales of their relationships that can only be talked about now. Broadcast details, etc will be announced at a later date. Stay tuned for more information.

[palestinegenocide]

274 Palestinian lives don’t matter to the Biden administration

This week provided further evidence – if any were lacking — that anti-Palestinian bias is simply a rule of American politics, and today maybe the leading rule.

Yesterday Israel killed 274 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp while freeing four Israeli hostages, and the U.S. promptly hailed the “rescue”. It is beyond question that this was an indiscriminate massacre, but Joe Biden saluted the Israeli action, and so did Secretary of State, without a mention of Palestinian lives.

“As if we needed more proof of how little this administration values Palestinian lives,” Khaled Elgindy wrote.

Mainstream reporters are horrified, but politely. After the last outrage earlier this week, when Israel killed dozens of Palestinians in a school, a reporter asked at the State Department: “People might find it very puzzling that you have the leverage of $3.8 billion of defense supplied to the Israelis per year, and you cannot compel this situation to change.”

The State Department said the U.S. has prodded Israel, and there’s been progress. “We have seen them [the Israelis] take improvements over time.”

So the U.S. keeps pouring money and weapons into Israel, and the Democratic base believes overwhelmingly that it’s a genocide, and Biden keeps saying he wants a ceasefire, but won’t apply any pressure to achieve it.

Republicans are at least more honest about their policy. Nikki Haley—a possible running mate for Trump —visited Israel at the end of May and wrote “Finish them” on an Israeli shell. Even as the death count in Gaza crossed 36,000.

This disdain for Palestinian life is consistent throughout the American establishment. Variety reported this week that a Hollywood marketing guru warned her employees that they should hit “pause on working with any celebrity or influencer or tastemaker posting against Israel.”

In an email, Ashlee Margolis said, “Anyone saying Israel is committing a ‘genocide’ is someone we will pause on working with, as that is simply not true…. While Jews are devastated by the loss of innocent lives in Gaza, we are feeling immense fear over the rising Jew Hatred all over the world.”

So again, Palestinian lives just don’t matter, next to Jewish fears.

This special degraded status for Palestinians has become an area of study for Palestinian intellectuals. Rabea Eghbariah, a human rights lawyer and doctoral student at Harvard, wrote a lengthy legal argument for a new term for the Palestinian condition.

“The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination,” Eghbariah wrote –and offered the idea of “Nakba” as a legal concept to encompass that subordination.

But Eghbariah’s argument was censored, first by the Harvard Law Review, in “an unprecedented” move against a fully-edited essay, as the Intercept reported. Then, in an even more unprecedented fashion, by the Columbia Law Review this week, whose board of directors, which includes alumni with ties to the Biden administration, actually shut down the entire website when Eghbariah’s piece went up. (In the ensuing controversy, they have now restored the site).

In the eyes of the world, Palestinians only count when they are dying. That is what Qassam Muaddi wrote at our site this week, in an essay titled, “Against a world without Palestinians.”

Over the years, learning our Palestinian history, I began to notice that in order to be acknowledged by the rest of the world, we Palestinians always had to die…. It is as if in order to exist without justification, Palestinians had to intimately deal with death — they could master it, put up the best show of it, but they always had to die.

Qassam went on to explain that all that builds Palestinian character, including culture and stories, has no place in the world as it is. It must always be dismissed as terrorism or something less than human.

He actually ends that essay with hope, that the global discourse of Palestine is finally changing.

And the next day, another 274 Palestinians were killed, with full U.S. support. And Democrats wonder why democracy is in crisis.

[redgoldsparks]

I did a short interview for an alumni spotlight on the CCA website. You can click through but I'll also just copy my answers below the cut.

Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir) is a nonbinary/queer/trans author and illustrator, a voracious reader, a k-pop fan, and a daydreamer. You can learn an astonishing number of intimate details about em in Gender Queer: A Memoir and in eir other short comics, published by The New Yorker, The Nib, The Washington Post and in many print anthologies. Gender Queer won a Stonewall Honor and an Alex Award from the American Library Association in 2020. It was also the most challenged book in the United States in 2021 and 2022.

Maia shares more about eir life as a full-time artist and activist, fighting to protect diverse literature and the freedom to access information.

1. What is your current practice/business?

I am a full time cartoonist. My job consists of days working at home writing and drawing mixed with days speaking out against book banning and censorship, and in support of the freedom to read, the freedom to teach, and the freedom to access information. I spend a lot of time talking with other authors, teachers, and librarians about protecting diverse and queer books from the current wave of conservative attacks. The first piece I drew for the comics journalism site The Nib was about the rise of fascism in the United States; my later writing about queer, trans, and nonbinary identities has led me into consistently political territory.

2. Why did you choose CCA?

I chose CCA because I was looking for a MFA Comics program, of which there are very few, and I wanted to stay in the Bay Area. Because I'm a local, I was able to meet the majority of the MFA Comics faculty before I applied and felt immediately welcomed into their community. The fact that a majority of my professors for the first year of the program were queer was a huge draw as well.

3. If you could share one piece of advice with current or future students, what would it be?

Every single person has a story only they could tell. No matter what media you are working in, do your best to tell the story which is uniquely yours. If you aren't ready to tell it yet, just keep making art until the time to share that story arrives. No time spent creating is ever wasted.

4. What's your secret to staying inspired and creative?

I realized fairly early in life that my very favorite way to spend the day was drawing while listening to music, a podcast, or an audiobook. I like making things! I would rather be making things than doing almost anything else. I created a life in which I can spend a lot of time creating things and even if I don't particularly know what I am making, I am happy.

5. What do you have coming up?

My second book, Breathe: Journeys to Healthy Binding, written with Dr Sarah Pietzmeier, is coming out in May 2024 from Dutton. It's a nonfiction comic about chest binding as an aspect of trans healthcare. I'm currently drawing my third book, Saachi's Stories, written with Lucky Srikumar; it's due out from Scholastic Graphix in 2026. I am also working on adapting Gender Queer: A Memoir into an audiobook.

[hologramcowboy]

The whole Danneel + LSU thing is so sketchy. I can’t find any mention of what year she graduated. We’ve never seen pictures from that time period. She’s only mentioned her college experience a few times (mostly party stories of course). She’s not listed as a notable alumni despite there being a very low bar for who they consider notable. She’s not in the 2001 Gumbo yearbook, the year she would have graduated from a 4 year program. I’ve tried looking at the ones from 2002 and 2003 in case she graduated late, but they don’t have a clear list of graduates. Still trying to find commencement programs from those years to see if she’s on them. Her Wikipedia doesn’t mention any education, only third party/rate websites do (the OTH forum says she majored in Beat Poetry, which is very much not a real major). The closet thing to proof is that she was mentioned on an LSU alumni forum/board back in 2008 when she did her spread for Maxim, and a Louisiana Life article from the same year that says she went for Mass Communications. And those obviously aren’t super reliable sources.

My guess is that she did go to LSU, but she didn’t graduate. At least semester or two because that was what was expected of her, and then she moved to California to try to become famous. Mommy and Daddy will only pay for the Studio City apartment if you give college a try first type of thing. Then to try and counteract her bitchy and promiscuous image, she pretended to be the only college graduate in the OTH cast.

It would also make sense that she went to LSU because her foot in the door to the WB/CW was the show What I Like About You, and one of the creators went to LSU (the same show was also run by several creeps known for their love for the casting couch, but that’s a whole other rabbit hole. Crazy that almost every single role D has ever had can be traced back to a creepy dude who gave her the role in exchange for sexual favors).

If it helps, this is the only mention I found from a more official source The Eunice News or whatever it is called.

For all the articles I found, none showed her actually attending OR graduating. The timeline doesn’t match anyway because articles immediately switch to her career in acting and so it seems she merely enrolled and then moved to L.A.

Notice how her mom talks about Danneel and how even she lies, claiming her daughter has standards ( we all saw what she did with her career)

This article also helps you get a sense how involved she was with Riley, they were building a life together way before Jensen came along.

Since we can see her mom completely lie about Danneel in this article, we can conclude that the apple doesn’t fall from the tree. Religious girls don’t do soft porn scenes, I’ll stop here because the rest is obvious.

[edit] Forgot to mention that Clownana was the first set J and D met on. You do the math from there.

[allthegeopolitics]

Student editors at the Columbia Law Review say they were pressured by the journal's board of directors to halt publication of an academic article written by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and upholding an apartheid regime. When the editors refused the request and published the piece Monday (Jun 3) morning, the board -- made up of faculty and alumni from Columbia University's law school -- shut down the law review's website entirely. It remained offline Tuesday evening, a static homepage informing visitors the domain "is under maintenance." The episode at one of the country's oldest and most prestigious legal journals marks the latest flashpoint in an ongoing debate about academic speech that has deeply divided students, staff and college administrators since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Continue Reading

[caswarrenart]

I know a lot of artists are antsy about art theft right now (myself included, I literally just had a terrible nightmare about fighting the physical manifestation of AI, The Mitchells vs The Machines style…). I can’t claim that any of these things can prevent it. But here’s a few things I’ve found useful:

Opening a free account on Pixsy.com. This website does a decent job at letting me know when my images have been reposted. 99% of the time, the results are just Tumblr-copying zombie websites that just repost everything that is already here. But, it’s sensitive enough that it alerted me when my old college posted my work. They were harmlessly using my stuff as an example of alumni work- but I was glad to be in the know, AND they had mistakenly credited my deadname, so I was able to reach out and correct that. I would have never have seen it otherwise. The website has subscription options, but you can ignore them and still use the monitoring services it provides.

Reverse image searching my most widely shared pieces on haveibeentrained.com. This website checks to see if your work has been fed to AI.

Looking up legal takedown letters and referencing them to draft a generic letter for my own use. This takes a bit of the stress off what is already a stressful and often time-consuming ordeal. Taking time to craft a Very Scary, Legally Threatening, Yet Coldly Professional Memo has been worth it.

Remaining careful about what and how I post online. My living depends on sharing my work, so I have to post it. I’ve learned through trial and error how to post lower resolution images that still look good, but aren’t easily used for anything beyond the intended post, and of course, strategic watermarking. Never, ever post full res, print quality stuff for the general public. Half the time it ends up looking unflattering on social media anyways, cause the files get crunched for being large. I try to downsize my images, while set to bicubic smoothening, to head that off. Look up the optimal image resolutions and proportions for individual sites before posting your web versions. For some work, cropping the piece, or posting chunks of detail shots instead of a full view, is a more protective measure.

Look out for other artists! Reach out when in doubt. Don’t steal from others. Learn the difference between theft, and a study/master copy/fanart/inspiration. Don’t assume that all posted art has the same intended purpose as a “how to” instructional like 5 Minute Crafts. Ask permission. Artists are often helpful and supportive towards people who want to study their work! And, the best tip-offs I’ve received have all been from other people who were watching my back. Thank you to everybody who keeps an eye out for my work, and who have been thoughtful enough to reach out to me when they see theft happening 💖 y’all are the real MVPs. All we have is each other.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

About Bill C-18 and the Meta news blackout, I also wanted to share how this affects not only bigger news outlets like the CBC, CTV, etc., but also hits local journalism, and far beyond just news. All campus and community radio stations are now blocked on Facebook and Instagram. For the campus station I volunteer at, that's 99% of their online presence (save for whatever is left of Twitter/X...). Unlike the CBC, which has spent the last few weeks on social media telling people to instead get their news on the CBC website and apps, no one really goes to campus radio stations' websites, except when sent there once a year during funding drives and donation campaigns. Even if they did, especially for smaller entities like community radio, we just don't have the staff nor budget to maintain a constantly updated website with full, new articles published throughout the day. The best we could do was post updates on social media and link to radio programmes.

It's especially a kick in the teeth considering the NCRA recently carved out grants to support local and community-level independent journalism on radio, and now no one can see us. Of course it's not just about music programming. The news journalists at our station (and others too, I'm sure) conduct interviews with local representatives and candidates, cover local news, updates and elections. Many leading journalists in the country got their start on campus radio at university, too.

Campus and community stations get their licences from the CRTC because their purpose is "to serve the community". Now information about community events, radio programmes, local news, promoting local talent, etc., which used to largely happen through publicising radio programmes and features on social media, is blocked. What will community radio do if it can't be where the community is?

Also, our funding drives are in jeopardy. In Ontario, Ford made all the fees that were included in university tuition optional, and so for the last few years we've been relying exclusively on money coming in from funding drives, and most of that would happen on social media: reaching out to the local community, to alumni, past volunteers, and all of their networks. If our social media presence is blacked out, I don't think our station and many others will even survive this academic year, and we're one of the longest-running radio stations in the world.

All this is to say, write to your MPs, please! Urge them to do something about it! Facebook and Instagram have embedded themselves so far into local community work, that to have local broadcasters locked out of the community would disrupt everything and spell the end for all of us. Find your local MP (https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en) and send them a letter urging them to reach a negotiation and end the blackout on Canadian broadcasters!

~~~~