if your bio says proshippers DNI, why in the fuck are you following me

like I really don't think "if you don't want me to interact with you, then don't interact with me" is a terribly difficult or objectionable ask

Coolest thing about lord of the rings? The king of horses shows up. It appears he is no different from all other horses

King of the eagles shows up later. He can talk. Horse king couldn't talk.

He didn't want to talk to you.

Uh.

Point of order.

King of Horses ran 450 fucking miles at almost entirely a gallop, without more than a few minutes rest, in 4 nights and basically was like "wait why are we stopping?" when Gandalf took him into the city and he ended up in a stable.

This was not his top speed, nor did it push any limits on his endurance.

King of horses is very different from other horses, actually.

Look, at a full gallop gallop (25 mph), that trip would take under a day (18 hours). Doing it in 4 doesn't sound so impressive now, does it.

I don't know shit about horses, but I have a feeling no mortal horse can sustain a gallop for eighteen hours without keeling over dead

Watching Przewalski's horses run free on the Kazakhstan steppe for the first time in 200 years

It's my time to shine as a horse girl!!

Anyway. This is incredible news and this species of animal is very special, very ancient, and very cool.

Since it's pride month I'm going to say. Can we stop making fun of adults who don't have sex. Not even particularly asexuals, just general people who don't like sex personally or don't want to have it for whatever reason. It's just not great to portray people who don't have sex as weird losers or naive little kids or whatever, even as a joke

Say it with me now

You are never late to a fandom. Your fic is never "invalid" for being "late". Your fic doesn't need a high word limit. Your fic does not need a high standard. Your fic does not need to be highly popular. Your fic isn't less valid than a popular author's fic. Your fic isn't inheritly bad. Your fic is amazing. Your fic is valid. The only thing that matters is that you're having fun. Fandom is not consumption and consumerism. Fandom is fun, free and for the people. Fandom is not a popularity contest. We're all nerds at the end of the day.

My favorite part of doctor who ever is when the doctor does their whole “I refuse to kill this villain/monster because of merciful moral reasons” bit and then immediately follows it with “so instead I will trap them alone in a barren hell dimension for all eternity”. It’s like that’s worse, though. do you get why that’s worse.

During the creation of Invader Zim they kept telling the creator to tone it down, it's a kids show. so Vasquez kept finding ways that were even more disturbing. I guarantee you that's what's going on behind the scenes.

Same thing happened with Batman: The Animated Series, I understand. (I think it's that one, anyway? Joker and Harley Quinn are the characters whose behavior is most affected, anyway.) And compare the Japanese dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters to the 4Kids English dub. (I wouldn't argue that any part of Yu-Gi-Oh! I'm familiar with is for kids, but the people editing for American audiences sure did.)

Banning death, blood, guns, and violence from children's media is a really good way to get media that is significantly more disturbing than it would be without those restrictions, and the people who impose those restrictions never notice this pattern.

What have you got there, my littol?

Ah yes, my shirt, I see, I see. And what are you doing with it?

Ah yes, wrassling it into submission, I see, yes.

Oooooh, and now that you have defeated it, you deliver it safely to me for a reward, huh?

Well, I do pay liver treats for stolen shirts, as a matter of fact.

Tristan stole nothing during this entire performance, that has to count for something

Look, I cotaught four obedience classes today ranging from obedience 1 to leash aggression (literally, those were my first and last classes of the day). And then I hung around afterwards and had a really interesting conversation with my senior trainers, in which I got to blend observations from my literal behavioral ecology PhD with stuff I'm learning from people whose training and teaching I deeply respect with literal decades of dog training experience. (I've spent most of my adult life teaching, this is not a low bar to clear.)

I say all that to let you know what kind of a day it's been for me, and I add:

this, what you say right here? This is an observation that stands out to me as a really useful story to tell, and if you don't mind I might use it as a teaching example moving forward? Because what this response does is remind everyone who ever trains a dog something incredibly important that a lot of people struggle with: in order to persist, a behavior has to feel rewarding to the dog*. If the dog is doing something that doesn't reward that dog,

It extends outwards from that, too. Just as anyone who trains a dog must understand that, so must anyone who advocates for a cause, parents a child, treats a patient, supervises an employee, or teaches a student. Anyone who heals from a trauma, anyone who changes their body or learns to inhabit it, anyone who trains themselves to their limits. It's a foundational insight. The behavior has to feel rewarding to the [actor] to persist.

We are all sometimes the trainer and sometimes the dog. We all wield power over other people at some times and allow other people to lead us forward and show us the way at others. When we think we are exercising authority, it's easy for us to forget this. The behavior has to feel rewarding to persist.

When you are the trainer, when you are trying to change someone else's behavior in a situation, it's important to remember that as often as you watch to catch the behaviors you don't want to happen, you need to reward the ones you do want. And the value of those rewards can only be assessed by the people whose behavior you are trying to change. It doesn't matter how good you think something is; tastes differ, and so does context.

When you are the dog, when you are trying to pass through someone else's authority and follow their rules, make sure to ask yourself: are their rewards good? Are they going to pay you for meeting their standards, or can you switch classes or find a better job or otherwise get into a new environment?

And when you are trying to be both the trainer and the dog at once, as when trying to teach yourself new cognitive or emotional skills? You have to figure out how to say honestly: that reward felt good. The same signaling system that teaches you new things and new associations? That's the one that also regulates how rewarding it feels to receive the hit of succeeding. That's what dopamine does. If it doesn't feel good or nice to get, it's a shitty reward to the dog in your head. The trainer maybe needs to experiment with what kinds of things the dog likes to figure out how to release the dopamine, but the dog has to actually like it in order for it to learn. Think of your limbic system in particular as the dog in the nervous system: it needs to genuinely feel things as nice after performing a behavior you want to see more of. So if a little treat makes you feel good about studying more, build little treats into your life so you can reward yourself for things that you do well. If your brain is capable of experiencing joy at the moment, make sure there is something good for it to feel after it does something good.

The behavior has to feel rewarding in order to persist.

Tristan stole nothing. He deserves a cookie!

*Removing a persistent unpleasantness from the environment is still a reinforcement, just a negative one. It actually works a lot worse than genuine positive reinforcement, and it results in a lot more difficulty getting the behavioral state you want.

It has been a while. Here’s a preview of my @yoichasinggoldzine 🥊. Please check it out for more beautiful yoi art and stories.

"um, how can you be trans if you didn't realize til you were X years old?" well you see, society tells us constantly and from a young age that 1. only OTHER people are trans, 2. they know for sure, so if you're wondering then you're not, and 3. you can't, and shouldn't, be trans unless & until you've exhausted every other option. so we think it can't be us, and then try everything else that we think could possibly make the feeling stop, and only in the dust of all that futile effort do we start asking the real questions. is that good enough for you?

oh and some of us kill ourselves or OD during the "exhaust every option" phase, so, jot that down. did you have any other brilliant questions?

“do you really wanna be on that medication for the rest of your life :(?” yes actually I would love that. I know what I’m like off it

Given that if I go off my anti rheumatoid arthritis drug I will die a slow, horribly painful and disfiguring death, that if I go off my anticoagulant I will die gasping for air I cannot use, that if I go off the diabetic meds infection will kill me also slowly, horribly and probably blind and missing more body parts?

Yes, yes, I do want to be on medication for the rest of my life.

I did the as natural as possible thing for a very long time, but four pulmonary embolisms, horrendous joint pain in 27 joints and skyrocketing blood sugar are not things I care to repeat. They were not enjoyable.

I am thoroughly bored of people calling me lazy for reasons that evaporate on days I take Adderall XR

I am very thoroughly bored of chronic pain

It is so relaxing to not have to intimately monitor my mood and its trends every day without fail in case I fall into a bad depression and don't realize it and leave myself unsupervised in case I fall into a lethal frame of mind and complete it. Chronic depression runs in my family and some of us got the aggressive kind and I got the inward-aimed kind. I will be on this med for the rest of my life and that's a threat.

When my health care lapsed before I was about to move I made an appointment with one of those 2017-ish video call instant doctors and explained that I know I need a primary care and a lot more miscellaneous prescriptions but here's the situation and I need these two specific medications (antidepressant and blood sugar) so I don't straight up die in the interim. He understood. I got the expected mini-lecture about how I do need a primary care to monitor and manage things, but I got the prescriptions I needed and now I am RELIGIOUS about filling my prescriptions early (all the ones they'll let me) so I have at least a month buffer built up now. Just in case some shit happens. Again.

fascinating

wow, I wonder which of these words anon thinks is unacceptable in polite company

I'm not deaf but I also have an important deaf oc and I always write his dialogue with normal quotations and use "signed" the same way I use "said" for my speaking characters. I read quite a bit of advice to write him well, so here are a fee bonus tips I've learned:

- lots of focus on the facial expression. Tone of voice doesn't really work if you can't talk, so expressive faces are essential to getting the tone across when a character is signing. They may exaggerate their expressions a little more than the average person, depending on their personality.

- related to that, the way they move their hands when signing is also important body language to convey the emotional tone of what they're saying. Snappy fast hands, halfhearted soft gestures, etc.

- deaf/mute does not mean complete silence! Even if a character is fully unable to use their voice, breath makes sounds. Snorts and scoffs and sighs, etc. Many deaf people are still able to use their voice, even if they can't speak clear words. So there can be vocal noises alongside the signed dialogue.

- some deaf people also can speak, whether it's because they're partly hearing or because they went through speech therapy or whatever. So it is possible for a deaf character to speak and sign, though it depends on a lot of different factors in your story.

- Hearing characters that know sign might also switch between speaking and signing or do both at once in order to accommodate their deaf friends/companions. My important deaf character is best friends with my protagonist, who is hearing and does sign and speak at the same time to communicate with his deaf friend.

I'm also writing fantasy, so I got to make the choice of giving my world an international/interspecies sign language that developed as a means to facilitate trade between different peoples, and particularly to help establish communication between sailors and merfolk. Obviously a more real-world story needs to follow different rules than fantasy, so look up the specific sign language your character will use and occasionally describe the gestures of specific words to emphasize them.

You’ve got some good points! I do want to note:

Please do not speak and sign at the same time, this is called SimCom (simultaneous communication) and it’s frowned upon. If you want to communicate the same information in sign and aloud, sign first, then speak.

I don’t think hearing people necessarily realize, deaf people can be loud! A lot of us will vocalize without noticing, especially when we’re discussing something that we get excited about, I’ve noticed with my friends. Also laughter! Deaf people laugh!

Since you mentioned deaf people speaking, I want to touch on deaf accents which come from what sounds a person can hear and how they learn to reproduce them. This can include speaking in a higher voice, dropping certain sounds, or mispronouncing things. There’s a huge range of deaf accents so I can’t describe every single one.

Exaggerated facial expressions and sign movement may be because they are part of ASL grammar (I don’t know a ton about other sign languages so I will stick to describing ASL). Some sign languages rely on facial movements to clarify the meaning of signs; that doesn’t necessarily mean the signer is a super expressive person. In ASL, emotion signs should be made with an appropriate facial expression. Expressions (and sign size) can also qualify a sign—the “degree” to which the concept is true. This is done with facial expressions, and the speed and size of the sign.

see a world so beautiful and strange (spinning off somewhere)

[or, alya is suppresses as rena rogue in order to protect her identity, but neither ladybug nor trixx will let her hurt herself like that]

🦊2,345 words | alya-centric, alya & ladybug friendship🦊

happy tourette's awareness month!!!

Hey guys, this is a really good fic. I love how it touches on Alya's thoughts and insecurities about having Tourette's, and how she gets comfort and validation!

Something I want to point out in yet another wave of mass bannings is the structural aspect that makes up a good chunk of every single one of these. That is, even if everyone on staff was perfect on queer issues, even if Matt and his bullshit disappeared and handed the site over to a literal saint tomorrow, we would STILL have a moderation bias problem if we don't magically solve the longstanding hard problem of making moderation at scale fair.

How so?

Imagine two users. One is a cisgender, heterosexual, white, abled person; the other is a trans person, or a Black person, or an indigenous person, or a disabled person, or any other marginalized person, or likely MORE than one of the above. Both like to kind of toe the line of acceptability re:"mature content" (or anything else really, but "mature content" is what's causing the problem here for many reasons). They go about their lives, they do their thing, they mind their own business.

User 1 flies under the radar basically forever, because pretty much nobody is going to object to them.

User 2...is likely to not be so lucky. User 2 is likely to run into bigoted asshole trolls who will mass report them for shits and giggles because they don't like trans/Black/indigenous people existing on the internet, or they don't like recognizing that disabled people can be horny, or anything else. So they'll report, and report, and report, until at least one of two things happens:

1) The automated system goes "oh fuck this one must be REALLY bad" and bans them automatically, and/or

2) The report lands on the desk of a human moderator and at least one is, at least arguably correctly, found to be a violation of TOS.

You see the problem? An enforcement system based on user reports, while still being....probably? the most efficient system we have - one of very very few that can even be argued to work AT ALL at scale - inherently leads to a situation where marginalized people are scrutinized more heavily than others. Even when the rules are being interpreted 100% fairly, even if everyone on staff is a perfect paragon of justice with no human flaws whatsoever, who never misclicks, who never makes a snap judgment because they had a bad day, who has zero societally imposed biases whatsoever, they're still ONLY punishing violations from the most marginalized people. People who don't get reported - usually mass reported - are effectively not bound by the rules, while people who are going to get reported for "terrorism" just for existing will have every arguable violation tracked. This is inherent to the system. This is structural.

This is an aspect that I think we should all be focusing on and trying to change a hell of a lot more than we are.

yeah, speaking as someone who previously worked for tumblr doing exactly that job, and who went on to do also exactly that job for discord, this is a genuine issue with moderation systems that depend on manual review (which is still, i’d argue, the most “fair” we can currently do in this field, more or less.)

especially now with recent laws like fosta/seats and other local to country regulations — companies are often obligated by law to manually look at and take action on anything that can be reasonably said to have been brought to their attention. meaning if you send a report to the site’s internal ticket system, by law that is you having given the company notice that you have a reasonable expectation that they will see. legally they must look at your report and legally they must make a judgment call, and by then it just makes the most sense to the company to take strict action on whatever is found so that daddy government won’t yell at them. a sheer volume of reports about one user or one post is an internal stressor to this system, and the employee actually doing the clicking of the button may feel pressure to act within the company’s “moral” framework (aka THE MONEY THE PUBLIC IMAGE OF US!!!) rather than to the letter of the user’s rights or to cultural morals.

moderation and user safety and security issues are often much more grayscale than you’d think, especially because so much of it has to be run internally past human beings who have never in their lives experienced other human beings who are slightly different from them (invariably white cis man 30 and older.) even attempts at clarifying problems for well meaning iterations of Todd, The VP of Safety lead to things like, for example, “female presenting nipples,” which as i’ve explained elsewhere happened absolutely because of a meeting I PERSONALLY HAD with management of tumblr’s then parent company in which my manager and i explicitly told them that trans men could not be forbidden from posting topless photos of themselves if tumblr wanted to maintain its image as lgbtq friendly. the corporate people we told this to were genuinely (to their best of their white cis ability) concerned about this, and thanked us, and told us they’d make sure it was clear trans men were thought of. and then… the legend began.

i wish i HAD better solutions. or any at all. i just want people to know that this IS a real problem, you’re not off base at all. the moderation workforce in my experience IS extremely queer and genuinely queer friendly. it’s the rest of the company leadership that’s usually the problem, and now we’re here at the age old issue of “lots of cis white american men with no human experience outside of waspy suburbia are the final say on how literally everyone else gets to conduct themselves online.”

and it’s easy to say “well we should just make our own spaces then with our own standards and rules!” but 1) the sheer domination of whiteness and heteronormativity within tech will always make that fifty times more difficult for us than it should be, and 2) we would STILL run into these structural problems, because let me tell you there are no angry reports about some user being Too Queer In A Too Gross Way than the ones that come from their fellow queers. at discord, frankly, the only reason dozens of shipping and fanart spaces have been left alone after being mass reported by angry little teens who call everything pedophilia or incest is because of JUST ME, and my intervention and explanation to my teammates and our leadership.

i’m not saying this in a “look at me savior of fandom” way. i’m saying this to point out that at a company like discord there was only ONE PERSON on the trust & safety team who had any context for fandom and queer community politics and who could accurately explain to everyone else why these reports were bogus. that is not a sustainable system, no matter how morally judicious i personally may or may not be. it’s fucked, is what it is. and i don’t know what changes it from here. i really don’t. other than, i guess, total revolution. but i’m preaching to the choir on that one, i fear.

Something I want to point out in yet another wave of mass bannings is the structural aspect that makes up a good chunk of every single one of these. That is, even if everyone on staff was perfect on queer issues, even if Matt and his bullshit disappeared and handed the site over to a literal saint tomorrow, we would STILL have a moderation bias problem if we don't magically solve the longstanding hard problem of making moderation at scale fair.

How so?

Imagine two users. One is a cisgender, heterosexual, white, abled person; the other is a trans person, or a Black person, or an indigenous person, or a disabled person, or any other marginalized person, or likely MORE than one of the above. Both like to kind of toe the line of acceptability re:"mature content" (or anything else really, but "mature content" is what's causing the problem here for many reasons). They go about their lives, they do their thing, they mind their own business.

User 1 flies under the radar basically forever, because pretty much nobody is going to object to them.

User 2...is likely to not be so lucky. User 2 is likely to run into bigoted asshole trolls who will mass report them for shits and giggles because they don't like trans/Black/indigenous people existing on the internet, or they don't like recognizing that disabled people can be horny, or anything else. So they'll report, and report, and report, until at least one of two things happens:

1) The automated system goes "oh fuck this one must be REALLY bad" and bans them automatically, and/or

2) The report lands on the desk of a human moderator and at least one is, at least arguably correctly, found to be a violation of TOS.

You see the problem? An enforcement system based on user reports, while still being....probably? the most efficient system we have - one of very very few that can even be argued to work AT ALL at scale - inherently leads to a situation where marginalized people are scrutinized more heavily than others. Even when the rules are being interpreted 100% fairly, even if everyone on staff is a perfect paragon of justice with no human flaws whatsoever, who never misclicks, who never makes a snap judgment because they had a bad day, who has zero societally imposed biases whatsoever, they're still ONLY punishing violations from the most marginalized people. People who don't get reported - usually mass reported - are effectively not bound by the rules, while people who are going to get reported for "terrorism" just for existing will have every arguable violation tracked. This is inherent to the system. This is structural.

This is an aspect that I think we should all be focusing on and trying to change a hell of a lot more than we are.

#this is why punishment for false reporting really should be mandatory passed a certain point #like: one misread report's nbd but if an account is massing frivolous or erroneous reports they ought to be punished for it (via @zenosanalytic)

It doesn't help that social media moderation is well known to be a job that has nasty effects on mental health, and the fewer people doing that job per hundred users, the nastier the effects.

Like. You the user report one post as hate speech or violent content or whatever upsetting thing it is. There's decent odds that's the only upsetting thing you'll see on social media that day, right? Especially if you yourself are only a member of one or two marginalized demographics, not several, and not the ones it's currently trendy to hate at top volume. And you have the option of logging out for the rest of the day.

The person who reviews that report—those hundred reports, those one report every ten seconds because there's so many more reports than moderators that even reviewing three thousand reports per moderator per day isn't fast enough to keep up with incoming reports—does not exactly have the option of leaving their job for the rest of the day. And they're not exactly getting hazard pay, either.

obsessed with stories that start out silly and stupid and then turn out to be deep and heartbreaking in their beauty. like okay, make me cry at midnight while i reflect on the true meaning of friendship i guess

I saw a post a little while ago that I'll never find again, but it's still bugging me. It was written like a PSA about proper procedure for applying testosterone gel--mainly, how you're not supposed to let it get on anyone else's skin.

And that's correct. But the post went hard on it, like "please, please be aware of the risks of this medication, it can do so much damage to others if you're not careful, I just think we should be honest about the advantages and disadvantages of medications like this."

It could've been sincere, but it gave me concern-trolling vibes real bad and I can't get it out of my head. So here's my PSA:

Saw some scaremongering misinfo going around, so I dug up this post again.

NOTE: re-reading it, I don't think I made this clear: The point of not letting it get on other people is mostly so that YOU get the entire prescribed dose.

(Also: if getting the effects of t-gel was as easy as brushing against someone's bare skin, don't you think trans guys would be constantly-ah, no, I shan't say.)