domestic long-haired cat ΘΔ (esther)

holding hands w the baby

wow, that's a very good point about how censoring certain types of pornography would also technically include the bible! please stand on this big white X away from population centers for a minute while I get to minimum safe distance and press the button that delivers your Won The Internet award

‘I feel violated’ - Queer Creators Lose Livelihoods in Itch.io bans The recent Itch bans on queer and NSFW content have damaged careers and put countless people out of work. Though some are now on the verge of homelessness, they’re still organizing and fighting back. TNN delves into what’s at stake on the frontlines of the fight against anti-queer censorship.

Over the past month, independent content hosting platform Itch.io has been systematically banning queer & NSFW content. We talked to creators about how this impacted them, and how they’re fighting back.

Written by @thefreeradical.org and edited by @davidforbes.bsky.social

if you see anything that looks remotely like discourse, blocking immediately then closing bluesky for the rest of the day is often the best option

Tapping this sign again. This heuristic has never steered me wrong, and every time i ignore it i end up dealing with horrible bullshit.

Morning hot take: we should not tolerate people trying to define "transsexual" and "transgender" as distinct things in our spaces

It causes useless discourse, gives cover for bad actors like true-trans gatekeepers, and worse still invites further division which we cannot afford rn

more pet commissions!

DO NOT POST ABOUT HOW YOU HAVE JOINED, ARE GOING TO JOIN OR HAVE TRIED TO JOIN A FAR LEFT MILITIA ON BSKY DOT APP THIS IS A BAD IDEA

(Day 4) めっちゃかわいいやん—! ♡ #ASUKAKAZAMA #TEKKEN8

The numbers are dire for the Signature loans CPC is supervising. Signature specialized in making rent regulated loans to landlords who intended to renovate apartments and raise rents. When the 2019 law made that strategy impossible by sharply limiting rent increases, the finances of those buildings cratered.

The problem, in other words, is entirely about debt, not the actual costs of providing rental housing. The problem is that building owners expected rents to rise faster than they turned out to, and took out bigger loans than the actual rent increases could justify.

Rent Freeze Proposal Chills Cash-Starved Owners of Bronx Buildings Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s pledge is raising alarms as bankers refuse to finance regulated buildings where costs outstrip income.

This article on on NYC landlords unable to pay their expenses gives a foretaste of what I suspect the pushback to a rent freeze is going to look like. www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/07/b...

Arthur C. Clarke's third law of prediction is, famously, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The kind of technology Clarke had in mind was one that truly works, but in such a sophisticated way that it is entirely opaque to the ordinary people who use it. The optimistic reading is that Clarke pictured our descendants in the role of the makers of such technologies as people who actually understood it. But perhaps not. Magical technologies work... mostly. When they fail and you ask for an explanation, they present you with a blank face. When you try to intervene to fix them, they offer you no purchase on their surface of smooth glass. Instead of controlling technology as a wise wizard might wield a staff, you are forced to fall back on magic's traditional social function-namely, the ritual performance of specific but obscurely relevant steps meant to compel the gods to do the thing you want. Yet the gods care nothing for ordinary people; their ways are mostly unfathomable, and our means of control over them are obscure and unreliable. Instead of elevating us to a world of magic, the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning reduces us to it. A final wrinkle is that, as it advances, this process tends to shrink and ultimately undermine the caste of priests. In simpler technological worlds, the gods may communicate more directly to supplicants. They speak cryptically, but the initiated understand what is being said. Beyond a certain point, though, there is both less room for understanding and fewer means of intervention. With few exceptions, technology's priesthood may find itself degraded to the unhappy state of the laity. It, too, must confront what it means to live in an age where a sufficiently advanced technology really has become indistinguishable from magic.

The last and most important skill we must acquire is how to write begging letters to an opaque machine.

A post by Bluesky user "mimi". The post appears to be an AI generated text referencing Rep. Mike Flood being berated at a recent town hall.

A screenshot of the likes on the above post. The names of the users (e.g. "lunarrift243", "lazygoblin162", "cleverotter215") indicate that they may be bots.

BlueSky is currently being hit with a wave of these bots which post LLM-generated tweets referencing current events

The likes appear mostly botted though some actual people seem to have fallen for it :(

(the only other post by this bot is a promotion for an adult site, also with botted likes)

Why am I seeing cliques of Popular Trans Women™️ fighting it out on my timeline? They should take this behaviour back to Twitter where it belongs

Rule out some issues first:

* Check if your drives are low on space especially the C drive
* Check that the RAM is functioning properly (e.g. Windows Memory Diagnostics)
* Check that disks are all healthy using CrystalDiskInfo/Mark
* Monitor CPU/GPU temperatures with HWInfo64, check for dust issues

Language can be modelled as an autoregressive process (with pretty good results), but to decide that brains must also work like that is just jumping the gun

Zohran didn't win by relying on standard turnout patterns. We had to fundamentally transform the Democratic electorate.

I was part of a group of NYC-DSA members that applied lessons from our previous campaigns to design the “universe” of voters to talk to. Here's how we won 🧵

A screenshot of a Carousell conversation. The buyer opens with "hi lowest price", and the seller responds "that's not my name".

Carousell, more like Carouhell

honestly more medications that work fast should be available to just fucking trial. i hear trans people be like "everything in my brain calmed down and got correct as soon as i took my first hrt". same with adderall. why the fuck is it easier to get cigarettes

The most problematic ship? Censorship

only someone who wants to divide trans people could have come up with that category

Look, if we don’t have air superiority at Pride, the cishet artillery and fighter bombers can hammer us at will, creating an opening for their mechanized divisions to exploit for a breakthrough.

By focusing on the most inflammatory games available, Collective Shout is trying to gain support for a broad ban of content. Friends of ours have had their livelihoods jeopardized overnight after having their games removed due to mature content, sexual or otherwise.

Morning hot take: we should not tolerate people trying to define "transsexual" and "transgender" as distinct things in our spaces

It causes useless discourse, gives cover for bad actors like true-trans gatekeepers, and worse still invites further division which we cannot afford rn

For a while I’ve operated with disability policy being my basic litmus test for someone’s politics. Recently, it’s become very clear that Palestine and trans rights are the most basic litmus tests today. If someone cannot be ten toes down for Palestinians and trans folks, they’re a fraud to me.

An eloquent image:

Setting aside the content under the tarp for a moment, teens were asked to make art expressing what it is like to be a teen, and the end result was a mural wrapped in a tarp by adults.

I bet a lot of teens would find this expressive of their experience.

‼️These are the people behind Collective Shout, KOSA and all the other global censorship and online privacy invasion initiatives: "The Committee has produced reports and working papers on implementing
digital safety by design for children"

Amazing to see 'pornography' listed alongside 'Terrorism'

A popular VPN is seeing a 1,400% spike in signups as the UK's age verification law takes effect Like clockwork.

Every time VPN installations surge in response to new laws, it deepens digital divides because the privileged who can afford VPNs get a better Internet than the less privileged who can't mashable.com/article/prot...

My paper against age authentication laws: ssrn.com/abstract=520...