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Complaining and documenting and analyzing the (dozens) of zoo sticker designs will elicit a blank stare from me while I sip my earl grey. There's no code to crack. You have not discovered anything we did not intend to show the world. What you see is all there is. And they are for us, not you. 🦄

There's a lot to be proud of here. We're much more than just talking heads!

Trans rights are not the rights of a minority. They are everyone’s rights to autonomy, to self-determination of our health and identities.

Attacks on trans rights are not attacks on a minority. They are steps to stripping everyone’s ability to live their own lives with independence and dignity.

Plenty of rituals are awful and destructive. But as long as your paricular ritual playing the show is enjoyable and beneficial, by all means continue! That's why we make it.

I think what you're noticing is ritual. It's not weird, it's just how people work. Rituals can be grounding, calming, clarifying, a way to reconnect people, or unwind, open yourself up, or let go. This is why we always end October with a Samhain. Life is so full of rituals.

When the actual behavior is harmless or beneficial, “slippery slope” and “gateway drug” arguments are used to invent a moral offense.

Why The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA’s Censorship Machine With KOSA? The Trump administration is methodically implementing every element of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 censorship playbook, and Democratic leadership’s response is… to help them? Ear…

“The bill’s lead sponsor was already openly stating last year that her support for KOSA was about using it to censor LGBTQ content. And Democratic leadership is actively helping to build the machinery of censorship that will be used against their own constituents.” www.techdirt.com/2025/05/14/w...

It's worth owning this book, but if you're a voracious reader or you don't have the means, borrow it! libbyapp.com makes it easy.

New Podcast Release: Rutger Bregman In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to historian and author Rutger Bregman.

One of the most powerful moments comes when Rutger names factory farming as today’s clearest moral failure and points out how hard it is to find anyone who will defend it publicly.

You can read extracts from our conversation on my Substack here:

Look past the marketing sizzle for a minute.

Sam and Theo connected with us a year ago to chat with the team about participating. We spoke for several hours constructively. Circumstances didn't line up in the end, but I'm hopeful this will be fair and faithful.

www.amcnetworks.com/press-releas...

I hope this episode makes it easier for you to get started talking about KOSA and age verification from an informed position, but there's a lot more out there if you're willing. Check out the show notes for links.

Go to 5calls.org or get their 5calls app. It's simple and tiny and makes it super easy to find your elected representatives, pick an issue, and you guessed it, make five calls. You can even organize call groups with friends and turn your 5 calls into dozens or hundreds.

Do the thing!

Sloppy, uninformed legislative language is an existential threat to sites like e621 and even to normie sites like pornhub and reddit. You can fight these bills and win. Colorado just killed theirs for now.

While Tarro, Mike, and I were combing through legalese and critical coverage from rights groups for this episode, e621.net dropped their April 1st prank, asking visitors to draw their ID for age verification. The result was a mountain of amazing little drawings, but to e621, it wasn't a joke.

I'm not joking. A few dozen calls about something is considered a big response at a local and state level, and it's very low effort to make that happen.

If you live in the United States, you aren't powerless to fight bad legislation. Your representatives answer to you, and their jobs are at risk if they don't. And they all know this. It does not take much feedback from YOU to change their mind about an issue!

Apple and Google both (reluctantly) offered very similar proposals that try to be simple, secure, and private by storing the least possible information about the fewest possible people. Neither is perfect, they are just the least bad solution we have, and probably good enough.

Handwaving away the details for the nerds to figure out doesn't work either. Some of it is technically impossible, or ruins business models, or is so expensive to do right that the only rational option left is to ban the people and the content entirely.

And that's before special interest groups get their hands (and money) on the bill to morph it into something that enables them to make their weird, hateful, sad hangups about queer people existing everybody else's problem, and giftwrapping it in "protect children" to make any criticism suspicious.

Now that we live online, it's inevitable that some form of strong age verification is coming to address real safety problems. But doing it in an inclusive way that doesn't exacerbate class divides, lock users into brands, protects free expression, and prevents censorship is very, very hard.

A Painted Dog dripping in trans colours, with 'Stand Tall' underneath it. Trans rights are human rights.

You are who you say you are.

With all that is happening in the US, please remember to be there for your friends and family. Community is going to be SO important in the coming years. It's one of the few things they can't as easily take from us.

This episode is deeply important to me and I wish I had been able to contribute to it more, but time and personal circumstances kept me away. I'm happy with the result though, and I'll add more thoughts to this later 🦄

This orb is a machine that converts bad vibes into baked goods and podcast episodes. Please continue; next season is coming along but my vegan snickerdoodles need work 🦄

My dad works at nintendo energy

I'm interested to see how bsky balances anti-harassment with fact correction, particularly with a community notes system. Twitter's notes were sometimes very low quality and harassment vectors

To clarify, I mean care about it everywhere instead of nowhere.

We're paying for it, too. Even community standards of conduct are weaker and more difficult to uphold, nevermind champion, if we all agree consent is important and nod our heads in solumn agreement without checking ourselves from time to time.

Lookin' at you, 3-letter rearguard and your imitators.

I don't know the answer, and it's not really my decision. What I do know is that Taboo Science is just the beginning, there's at least one more major project on the horizon which will absolutely feature consent issues, and we're all skipping leg day on purpose.