so SAG-AFTRA finally released some official guidance for fans, viewers, creators/influencers, critics, and more during the strike. here's what you need to know:

1. if you see a publication/news source/journalist talking about a piece of struck work, that's ok. they're allowed to do that.

2. they're asking regular viewers and fans to DONATE TO STRIKE FUNDS, SHOW UP TO PICKETS IF YOU CAN, and please do NOT boycott streaming services or movies in theaters.

3. influencers, content creators, cosplayers, and anything in between is still a bit of a grey area, but they're asking people to use their best judgement. "organically" means UNPAID promo (like an invite to a premiere without being paid, being sent a publicity box, letting the company's social media post a photo of you in cosplay, etc).

obviously this doesn't answer every question, and isn't hard and fast rules for fanworks, but it can at least inform how you personally choose to move forward when posting online and moving publically. i hope this helps!

The United Auto Workers are also negotiating new contracts with the big three US car manufacturers and have announced that they're prepared to strike if they can't get a fair deal.

I’m curious as to where you all stand

Reblog for demographics!

Has either union called for a boycott? Because boycotting can disrupt their plans and make negotiations harder unless they’re actively asking for one. I’m boycotting reality TV (which every studio is going to be pushing because it’s the only content they can make cheaply and without writers or professional actors) but nothing else unless we are asked to.

#i always understood that boycotts and strikes were sort of two opposing strategies#if a strike is happening you want demand to continue as normal because the point is to prove what would happen without your labor#a boycott is reducing demand and the point is usually in response to a practice that cant be solved by employees walking out#for instance a boycott might be ideal for protesting AI generated content (via @displacedlabrat)

This is correct. If anything, I want the execs to be terrified because the consumers are demanding more from them and they have nothing in their reserves to sell and no way of making anything else to sell.

Also "new" content is going to keep coming out for a while because it's already been written and acted and edited. (I'd actually expect a lot of bad-but-finished movies that would normally never be released to get released once they start running out of the good stuff) There is less than no point to boycott anything right now.

1) Nobody in the unions has called for a boycott.

2) Boycotting takes away the residuals/initial payout due to the actors and writers right when they aren’t working.

3) Boycotting let’s the studios say “See? You aren’t valuable; nobody wants your labor” which is precisely the opposite of the message to be sent.

I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again

To be clear to those unfamiliar: these are the companies that libraries use to lend ebooks.

They are literally cutting off library access to minors.

If you are affected by this or other bans and restrictions in the United States, be aware that the Brooklyn Public Library is offering free digital library cards to anyone age 13-21 nationwide as part of their Books UnBanned initiative:

BOOOOOST

Seattle has joined them:

Leona's post is here.

Her YT video is here.

Please spread Leona's story, and her evidence, as much as you can. She has a mountain of evidence proving Bethesda/Zenimax a hostile work environment for trans women, and she deserves to be heard and to receive justice for being forced out of her job.

18:30 UTC on July 11, 2023

As of now AO3 is back up. However, in the past hour the OTW website and the donation platform have become inaccessible. We believe it is part of the same attack first made on the Archive. We will be providing updates via this account.

We also want to alert fans that on Twitter someone using the name AO3_Status_ (note the second underscore). If you are on Twitter, please block and report this account. 

The fake account is impersonating our service status account and attempting to scam AO3 users out of money. Fans on all platforms should be wary of anyone soliciting money on behalf of the OTW or its projects at this time. (The real donation form is currently down due to a DDoS.)

Open Doors and Legal Advocacy pages are also not available at this time. Our Fanlore project is being worked on and should be back today.  Our Transformative Works and Cultures site has not been affected. Thank you for being patient while we restore services!

Ok fess up, who is the pathetic no-life who decided taking down a fanfiction site was the most productive use of their time?

“oh they’re not taking away chronological dashboard, well everything’s okay then” they also said in the post they’re making reblogs collapsed (like comments on twitter) so you won’t see the full conversation in a post. they also won’t get rid of tumblr live despite it being an annoying and cancerous data-miner that isn’t legal in much of the world. they won’t even let you opt out of tumblr live for more than seven days. they implemented a terrible photo viewer that mimics tiktok and makes it so you can’t zoom in on images. they took away the ability to view prev tags. they’re making it so you have to sign in with your email to view almost any thing on tumblr. they’ve already made it so you have to sign in to send asks, even on anon. they’re slowly phasing out custom blog themes.

the things that make tumblr at all usable and favored by us– the older web blog features, the anonymity– that is still being taken away. it HAS been being taken away for some time now. i am urging you people to reveiwbomb the tumblr app. force them to acknowledge that users do not like these changes.

Let me stress: Collapsing reblogs would turn tumblr into a completely different site.

A massive chunk of our site culture - arguably our entire site culture itself - is based on the collaborative nature of posts. The fact that many posts are chains of relevant additions or Bits done by multiple people is the appeal. This is not an “outdated format” or an inconvenience, it is a core function.

Also I can’t help but suspect that this partial walkback is misleading. Okay, so we still get to have a chronological dashboard, but are we going to be allowed to keep it as our default tab? Because new accounts sure fucking can’t set as such.

Reblog chains are literally what makes tumblr posts tumblr posts

i do find it a bit frustrating when people respond to the uncomfortable truth that some really well made pieces of art are made with crunch or other unhealthy work practices, and therefore believe that the only sustainable morally ethical alternative, are ugly/uninspiring pieces of art, like as if the bad cgi in mcu movie's aren't also the result of crunch.

recently some animators who worked on across the spider-verse talked about the unhealthy work practices that went into making the movie and while i do think this article is worth the read i do take a bit of a grain of salt with this part.

i feel at face value, the takeaway from this would be "it's impossible to make a movie like across the spider-verse without overworking the animators" but i feel like the more obvious takeaway is that making ANY project with the tight deadlines and margins that are often asked by corporations is extremely stressful and backbreaking, but also the ask of "absolute perfection" because i'm sure the movie still looked great before the constant revisionism. because like the whole rhetoric of "it's impossible to make great looking media without crunch" does not make people more tolerable to ugly look media, despite how many people post that "i want shorter games with uglier looking graphics" meme online.

tl:dr saying stuff like "it's impossible to make something that looks as good as spider-verse without crunch" is kind of like saying "spider-verse looks as good as it does BECAUSE of crunch" which is, just isn't true in fact, it could of looked even better, if the animators were given more of a heads-up ahead of time instead of being forced to completely re-animated scenes that were already finished.

framing the crunch as just the natural consequence of making a film like spider-verse just kind of feeds into the whole notion that "real art requires human suffering" which like no, humans who are being treated like human beings can actually still produce art that's extremely amazing. happy people can still make movie with good animation believe it or not.

watching reddit go into a full death spiral is like watching the specifically trans equivalent of the library of alexandria go up in flames

like yes reddit is also the only place on the internet you can get an actual answer to any question in general. but it’s also a huge centralized community database about which surgeons will fuck you over, who takes what insurance, which doctors you can trust, how to write a template therapist’s letter, insurance appeals, peer support, questions that feel too stupid to ask anywhere else, diy guidelines, “hey this is embarrassing but,” finding trans people in your area, explaining why you need PTO without getting way too personal about it, safety tips, et cetera you get the picture

Someone on trans Reddit just bought the url transgender.org and have put out a call for folks to help turn it into a replacement (and more). Here's a link on r/ftm but it's open to everyone

Here's how to use the archive.org Wayback Machine to save webpages. Get what you can while it's up, prioritize the most important information. And save links to the pages in a text file so we have a record of what survives.

r/datahoader is also providing resources for saving and archiving reddit info.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiveteam_has_saved_over_108_billion_reddit/

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/historic_reddit_archives_ongoing_archival_effort/

this is why you should care about the reddit strike

This is a big concern for the moderators internally too. We've checked our own subs in archive.org to see what is available and will be making steps to make materials available independently of reddit. Archival organizations are working overtime on Reddit right now because they know it might fucking implode soon.

ID: A tweet by Freyja Katra Valentine @FreyaErlings posted at 2:06 PM June 12, 2023. The text says: Watching everyone slowly realize in real time that reddit being down means a major source of practical knowledge and advice that is searchable on the general internet is gone, and so is everything that reddit had replace. End ID

If the Reddit strike isn't a wake-up call to the CEO about their profit maximizing methods, it'll be a wake-up call to the rest of us to start backing up information and resources that we never thought twice about before.

This site has been going around Twitter trans accounts quite a bit lately, so just pointing out here too that it'll do fuck all, they're exploiting trans people at a time when hrt is particularly hard to access and please don't give them your money

fuckin exploitative bullshit marketed in the worst way imaginable

literally selling laxatives as weight loss supplements

Reddit post by Dr Will Powers

No actually, this needs to be in the body of the post.

This isn't someone looking to make a quick buck off the backs of desperate trans women.

This is someone who is gathering a hit list. This person may use your info for active swatting, but not just that, this product will kill you.

This product is outright dangerous. This dose of ashwagandha is ASTRONOMICAL. It's anxiolytic - meaning that it causes agitation and anxiety - and if you take this dose every day you'll be developing serotonin syndrome within 4-6 weeks, and an ER trip/death within 8. And if you're on medications that interact (SSRIs, antipsychotics, most kinds of opiates) or alcohol, this risk is magnified.

This person wants to KILL YOU.

Also the photo they're using for the founder is AI generated. The easiest tell is the neck tattoo seemingly merging with the collar of the shirt, and none of the locs actually having an end that connects them to the scalp.

There's a terf in the comments screeding about how this totally isn't a rightwing psyop and it's asian fetishizing trans ppl obsessed with anime doing this, so here's some irrefutable proof that it is, in fact, a right-wing dox honeypot!

If you go to any post by TheQueerQuirk on Twitter and replace the username part of the url with transaretr8ors it will redirect you to the same tweet with the new username, indicating that TheQueerQuirk's old username WAS in fact transaretr8ors. You can test this yourself.

They're also stealing images from r/transtimelines for fake reviews.

Their domain name was registered on June 2 and the address marked is a common scam address (seemingly of the Icelandic Phallological Museum).

THIS IS A HONEYPOT. THEY'RE COLLECTING ADDRESSES. YOU COULD BE SWATTED, HAVE YOUR IDENTITY STOLEN, OR AT THE VERY BEST RECEIVE A PRODUCT THAT WILL CAUSE SEROTONIN SYNDROME.

SPREAD.

Here’s an extract of her talk:

“I have a vagina. Just thought you should know. Just thought you should know. I look like a woman. I’m dressed like one, I guess. The thing is, I also have balls….I’m not male or female. I’m intersex.

“Most people assume that you’re biologically either a man or a woman, but it’s actually a lot more complex than that. There are so many ways somebody could be intersex. 

In my case, it means I was born with XY chromosomes, which you probably know as male chromosomes. And I was born with a vagina and balls inside my body. I don’t respond to testosterone, so during puberty, I grew breasts… I don’t actually have a uterus – I was born without one, so I don’t menstruate, I can’t have biological children…

“We put people in boxes based on their genitalia. Before a baby’s even born, we ask whether it’s a boy or a girl, as if it actually matters; as if you’re going to be less excited about having a baby if it doesn’t have the genitals you wanted; as if what’s between somebody’s legs tells you anything about that person. 

Are they kind, generous, funny? Smart? Who do they want to be when they grow up? Genitals don’t actually tell you anything. Yet, we define ourselves by them. In this society, we love putting people into boxes and labeling each other…

“But there’s one really big problem: biological sex is not black or white. It’s on a spectrum. Besides your genitalia, you also have your chromosomes, your gonads, like ovaries or testicles. You have your internal sex organs, your hormone production, your hormone response and your secondary sex characteristics, like breast development, body hair, etc. 

Those seven areas of biological sex all have so much variation, yet we only get two options: male or female. Which is kind of absurd to me, because I can’t think of a single other human trait that there’s only two options for: skin color, hair, height, eyes…”

Listen to whole talk here. Believe me, it is worth your time!

Saying sex isn’t binary because some people are born intersex is like saying humans have tails or extra fingers because some people are born like that…

The definition of a binary is that only two options exist. Therefore, the existence of intersex people means sex cannot be a binary by definition. It can have a bimodal distribution- and indeed, it does- but it cannot be truly binary.

Humans can indeed have tails and extra fingers, in the same way that humans can be intersex. If you said ‘humans always only have five fingers on each hand’, you’d be wrong. If you said ‘humans can only be 100% ‘male’ or 100% ‘female’’- i.e. that sex is binary- you’d be equally wrong.

I’d like to also take this opportunity to remind people that there are more people with intersex conditions in the world than there are natural redheads or people with natural ambidexterity, and yet we always talk about how intersex people are statistically unimportant, a fluke, a mutation, because they’re such a small percentage while redheads are included in surveys and accepted as a possibility in almost all aspects, and ambidexterity is recognized as an existing middle state in what could very easily be reduced to a (mistaken) binary as well. Hmmmmm.

This has become one of my most popular blog posts ever, with more than 47,000 likes and reblogs. The main reason is likely because Emily Quinn gives this kind of diversity an unavoidable human face. 

I would like to add one more thing: What those who are committed to the strict binary forget is that the variation found in intersex people continue into the world of non-intersex people. 

Take genitals: Some intersex people have what people call “ambiguous” genitals. But the genitals of non-intersex people also vary a lot in shape and sizes. 

Some scientists argue that there are as many as nine different types of vulvas. The average penis size is between 13cm and 18cm (5in to 7in). But a large number of men have penises that are not of average size, from less than 4cm to more than 26cm long. Some have identified as many as seven different penis types. 

You cannot draw a clear line between the normal and the abnormal, when it comes to human genitalia.

Averages are precisely that: averages. Nature is ruled by diversity, not averages.

Anyway with anti-sodomy laws back on the discussion table I'm going to repeat that you can personally be squicked out by the consensual sex someone else has, but saying that their consensual sex between willing, active, adult participants should be illegal and is indicative of some sort of moral failing is L I T E R A L L Y a major facet in extreme homophobia and absolutely has gotten people killed.

You don't have to like their business but as long as everyone involved in the encounter is saying yes, it's also really not your business.

This is the precident you are helping further by digging your heels in and saying 'but I think it's gross and makes them bad people'. This is what happened last time that was the reasoning for law, and what is being threatened to happen again.

"but Jaz, how would they enforce it"

Easily.

People would report you to the police for any hint of it. Whether real or imagined. You held hands with someone of the same sex. Someone started a rumor that they saw you kissing. You bought a sex toy and the vendor automatically reported you. You clicked a web page or picked up a magazine that had a different suspected deviant on it and the shop owner or internet service provider automatically reported you. You had certain mannerisms. You hung out to much with a specific friend. You seemed too close to a family member. Literally anything.

In some cases people would literally peep through windows, listen at the door, even wait across the street for your guest to come over and then call the police to kick the door down and catch the two of you in the act.

Never forget that the Stonewall riot was started by one such raid where police stormed a gay bar looking to arrest as many "sodomy" and "public indecency" suspects as possible.

That's how. By encouraging people to barge into other people's private, consensual sex lives and make reports to the authorities. By encouraging people to lay traps so unsuspecting gay people could stumble into them. By encouraging people to stalk and harass anyone who showed any sign of 'being a pervert' in the name of 'protecting neighborhoods from predators'. By weaponizing the real concern for predatory behavior against people who were engaging in consensual intimacy in a way they happened to not like.

By doing exactly what I've been continuously saying is bad behavior that has gotten countless LGBT people jailed and killed.

We're not turning this against our own community. Homophobes and transphobes have already made it plenty clear they don't care how good or respectable we are, they just want us all dead.

"how would they enforce it"

well in 2012 a guy named snowden let us know they're basically wiretapping us at all times and have gigantic collections of all our metadata and we have been living in a nice little surveillance state since 2001's patriot act

My uncle used to hang out in those public parks after dark where gay men would solicit sex - from each other, from sex workers, and (when they were particularly unlucky) from undercover cops.

Having sex with a partner in your home was dangerous because it was too identifiable. Your neighbors, your landlord, your family, your friends, any one of them could happen to notice if you brought a boyfriend or a one night stand home, and this was before we had any right to privacy in our homes.

So anonymous sex in the park was SAFER for gay men. As long as you didn't draw the short stick and snag a cop. A cop who would, just as they often do today with sex workers, happily have sex with you before cuffing you, walking you into the station through every reporter in town, and splashing your name and face across the morning paper with a sodomy charge. Then your life was effectively over. And they would leverage that to make you tell them names, give up others to have their lives ruined in the hopes of salvaging what was left of your own.

My uncle came a little too close one day, nearly got caught up in a raid at the park he was at with some friends. He illustrated children's books for a living. If he was caught he would never work again. So he fled. Borrowed some money from my mother and *fled the country*. He only came back once a year, long enough to fulfill visa requirements. He only came back with his boyfriend in 2005 when my mother assured him that things were safer.

If the enforcement of these laws could ruin lives like that back then, how badly do you think it could go for us in the era of unprecedented near total surveillance? Our memories need to be long enough to remember that these laws and the methods used to enforce them are not hypothetical. They have already happened and ARE already happening. There is precedent, there are known mechanisms, and there are known ways to gum up the works too.

I think perhaps endless pissing contests over which kind of trans person has it worse are very, very useless when we're all getting shoved in the meat grinder right now.

Ron DeSantis isn't exactly asking my pronouns before he passes Illegal To Be Trans bills, takes away everyone's HRT, and imprisons trans parents as child abusers.

I don't care about your transmisogyny vs transandrophobia discourse right now, tumblr, I'm too worried about the literal goddamn genocide that's brewing in my home state right now, you feel me?

Can we all express some fucking solidarity with each other for five fucking seconds?

As an intersex person who has experienced transphobia from people mistaking me as a trans woman AND as a trans man, neither of you have systemic privilege over the other, so shut the fuck up and fight the system instead of each other. Thanks.

I'm just tired of sitting here as an intersex person watching people decide that some things are "a trans woman experience" and some things are "a trans man experience" when it doesn't work like that and I have, in fact, experienced quite a lot of "trans woman things" and "trans man things" despite being neither

we all have different experiences that overlap sometimes; instead of fighting over which experience is harder, how about we fight the people putting us in these situations in the first place

I'm never going to forget the time my bisexual mother told me that during the AIDS crisis she kept getting pushed out of queer "safe spaces" because bisexuals were often viewed as the reason that the disease was being spread so widely. Bisexuals of all genders, according to my mom, were treated like absolute pariahs even in a lot of queer spaces. Maybe not everywhere and by everyone, but it was common enough that my mom still tells bitter stories about it making her feel isolated and scared.

So at least the queer infighting isn't some new thing, I guess. We've always had to deal with the bootlickers, the psyops, the bad-faith discoursers, and the general fuckwads who are more interested in fighting each other than the system keeping us down.