REBLOG if you are old enough to remember what a VCR is.

Not only do I remember, but I am one who could PROGRAM mine

I'm surprised I haven't seen any art shipping Willy Wonka and the Unknown yet

Oh god, please don’t speak that into existence 😂

Context:

The original video, for anyone who hasn't seen it:

And the relevant album cover:

Sessler was a teenager when "We're Not Gonna Take It" it was on the charts. Probably had MTV so he saw the video.

No fuckin' idea how he thought it was in support of "traditional American values."

Never not reblog. Dee Snider is iconic and queer as fuck for a cishet man.

-fae

No one disrespects my man Dee in this house.

Never forget when he sat in front of a congressional hearing about Lewd Music Corrupting the Youth and completely shut that shit down in the most professional manner that no member of that committee expected from a hair metal musician. They thought they'd get easy points off of a dumb metalhead and this man not only knew exactly what the fuck he was talking about, he tore their arguments apart.

DUDE THE VIDEOOO

For those unfamiliar with this ICON

Random writing thought: the best stories are often the ones that only you could have written — but also the ones that you could only write at this one moment.

I couldn't write All the Birds in the Sky from scratch now if I tried. But the me of 2013 couldn't have written The Prodigal Mother either.

When people ask if I'd change anything about a book I've already written, I want to explain to them that I'm not the person who wrote that book any longer, and even if I tried right now I'd write a different one. Everything you make as a writer* is a combination of what you want to say and who you are at the time you are telling that story.

*possibly also as an artist or as a human being

Unmute !

"I'm a beagle!" is absolutely how beagles operate.. (and I'm sitting here trying to figure out if the foam weapons are from a workshop I know or homemade)

Way way back I drew a comic explaining what we really mean by ‘The Autism Spectrum’ and posted it here back when Tumblr was Huge. Then the comic really blew up!! Last year I did a remake of the comic, with some updated language, and using Mia, a character from a graphic novel I made. Figured I’d share for Autism Acceptance Month!

Some Villain: Oh Doctor, you think you can just walk away and get a happy ending? Oh no no no. What will you do when your precious family have been kidnapped by me? When you try to save them and fail -

Donna, barging out of her front door: OI! OFF MY LAWN!

Donna *beating the villain with a broom*: HE. IS. RETIRED!

Doctor and Rose: *watching from the front window and sipping tea*

Rose: So how many is that?

Doctor: Third one this week

nothing in the world makes me more evil than just being kind of annoyed

me when i'm in genuine agonising distress: i'm so sorry if i'm bothering you with my childish histrionics :/

me when i'm just in a bit of a bad mood: i hope hydrogen bombs fall on every living thing in the universe

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

I've found a new toy

Heh heh.

...And I can think of entirely too many things this could be used for. :)

(the original post is here)

“Mom, there’s someone under the bed.” You bend down and see your son there instead and he whispers “Mom that’s not me up there!” You take a step back when someone tugs your shirt. You turn, your son is in the closet asking “who are they?” You suddenly hear him calling from downstairs “Mommy?”

You sigh, raising your voice so that all of your sons can hear you. “All right, everyone into the kitchen. Now.” Hearing a shuffle in the attic, you add, “Yes, Duncan, that includes you.”

You don’t see any movement as you go down the stairs, but you’re used to that. You know they’ll all be there by the time you walk through the kitchen door.

As usual, your children have all fitted themselves into the kitchen. The dimensions of the room are a little wobbly with so many of them present, but you’ve long ago learned to ignore how the laws of physics only occasionally apply to them. A host of little faces look up at you anxiously, and you smile gently.

“It’s okay, none of you are in trouble,” you reassure them. They relax - and how astonishing is it, that they trust you so much? You’re so proud of their progress.

One, however, still looks nervous. You beckon him forward, and he comes reluctantly, shoved by his identical older brothers.

“Are you new?” you ask carefully.

He nods, and you drop to one knee. “It’s okay, sweetie,” you tell him firmly. “I love all of my sons, even ones I haven’t met before. Ask your brothers, they’ll tell you.”

“’m here because I heard you were nice,” he says in a tiny voice.

You open your arms, offering a hug but waiting to let him decide whether he wants one. This child must have seen hugs before, because he flings himself into your arms and starts crying. That’s good. Some of your sons are traumatised from what they’ve seen, knowing more slaps than kisses.

Eventually, the sobs dry up, your other kids patiently waiting for your attention again. “Why do we look like this?” he asks, curious.

“Because this is what the first of you looked like - Wilson, where are you?”

A hand raises from the crowd and waves energetically.

“Wilson took on my son’s form to play Child or Double. Calling from downstairs when my son was in bed, getting tucked in when the child I bore was playing out in the garden. Once I figured it out, I hugged him and told him that as far as I was concerned, I now had twins. It took him some time before he believed me.”

Wilson shrugs unrepentantly.

“When my son died, Wilson stayed. It helped, having one of my sons with me while I grieved. Then another of you began to turn up, and I had twins again. Then more. Until now, when I have more of you than will technically fit in my kitchen.” You give your sons a look of motherly disapproval, but they only giggle. They know you don’t mind.

“It’s not like you need to feed us!” calls out one of your bolder sons. Eric, probably. Your newest, unnamed child looks up hesitantly, then steps out of your arms to join his brothers. Lucas might be a nice name, you think idly. You don’t have a Lucas yet.

“That does help,” you admit. You put steel into your next words. “However, there are Rules in this house, and one of them is no messing around at bedtime. I know that bedtime is a traditional time for the Child or Double game, but four of you is pushing it.”

You’d say more, but there’s a knock at your back door. You turn to answer it, knowing that your sons will have evaporated before your fingers grasp the handle, and brace against the cold night air as you pull the door open.

Two identical little girls stand there. One has a bruise on her cheek, and has clearly been crying recently. The other - the other is a Doubler, just like your sons. After this long, you can tell the difference.

“Please,” the Doubler says, and her voice trembles on the word. “Please. She needs somewhere to stay.”

Part of you is shocked, already looking ahead to the potential legal issues. The rest of you is all mother, and you whisk her into the nice warm kitchen and get her a glass of water.

Your son’s bed will be occupied by someone else tonight. You think he’d have been okay with that.

Hey not for nothing but this is exactly why I have no trust in digital media "purchases" that aren't physical and also why I am of the opinion that if a physical option isn't made possible then it should be considered morally neutral for me to download a copy for my own digital collection to view when offline.

If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.

If you fucks actually go through with not voting on your next USA president elections and subsequently lead Trump to power again.

Yes. Yes I'm going to blame every single American for that. Collective responsibility and all that jazz.

Explaining in simple terms: if you don't vote for Biden because "he is murdering palestinian babies", you will get Trump as a president, who, being an open and proud islamophobe, will murder even more palestinian babies.

It is no good situation when you have to choose between two shitty candidates. But you have a two-party system.

russia has previously aided trump during elections, and they will do so again. A call to boycott the elections = a call to support trump

You are in no position to afford the privilege of being idiots.

Also this.

Also, a lot of his goons have been filling a LOT of important spots in the military and civilian fields to have positions available for trump to fill in with his loyalists and to easier do a hostile takeover if he wins the election.

IF YOU DON'T VOTE FOR BIDEN YOU WILL GET A DICTATORSHIP BY TRUMP AND WE WILL ALL BE FUCKED

I don't know how many times we have to tell people to make everythingin their power to stop Trump from coming to power again. USA will be fucked. Ukraine will be fucked. Palestine would be fucked. We don't know how many other countries will be fucked.

Trump's presidency already gave cart blanche for the international far right rise, and I don't think we need to spell out to people that the state of the world today is directly credited to Trump's presidency, his incompetence, him being Russian puppet, etc etc.

As much as I am actually an opponent of the whole idea that USA is responsible of everything in the world, it does have a huge influence on international politics scene.

SO GO VOTE.

And since USA is a democracy, then, again, y'all are responsible for the president you elect.

I really really really don't think you've been reading what I wrote there with your reading eyes.

I literally said up there "USA will be fucked" so like pretty good indicator that I don't hate you. THEN I said "Ukraine will be fucked" which, as a Ukrainian, makes me very aware Trump election will affect us.

Are you conflating collective responsibility and wanting you to experience what USA has been complicit in? Where was it said up there I want you to suffer?

Maybe through some reading comprehension classes, yeah

Jumping in to say that I'm already hearing from people in my life that they are going to vote 3rd party because they don't like Trump or Biden. While this is a right afforded to voting Americans, this is not the fucking year for that.

Please vote Biden. Please vote a blue ticket - Democrats all the way down. There is no such thing as a perfect party, let alone a perfect politician, and I get it. I have criticisms of Biden too. But for fucks sake, Biden is the lesser of two evils here, and Trump supporters are not going to vote independent! Democrat voters have always, always been more likely to vote independent compared to Republicans, so you are not taking votes away from Trump, you are taking votes away from the person most likely to beat Trump in the polls.

I saw this phrase a lot four years ago, and I think it's time to bring it back:

just hold your nose and vote for Biden/Harris

Please remember what happened in 2016. Trump won that time in part because people wouldn’t vote for Hillary. So they either didn’t vote at all/went third party/wrote in. Learn from the past and know: if Trump gets a second chance, he likely won’t miss this time.

“The WBD tactic of scrapping fully made films for tax breaks is predatory and anti-competitive,” the San Antonio Democrat wrote. “As the Justice Department and @FTC revise their antitrust guidelines they should review this conduct. As someone remarked, it’s like burning down a building for the insurance money."

Ao3 is actually massively culturally important and very very good at being what it is. I’m so serious when I say that ao3 needs to be protected as the anti censorship, by fans for fans, nonprofit, volunteer run, expertly designed archival site that it is. You don’t have to read or like fanfiction to understand that on principle, ao3 is a site that should be defended.

Dude with all due respect ao3 was literally created because other fanfiction sites kept deleting and censoring stories with rape, noncon/dubcon, incest, etc porn as well as LGBT ship fics. The site does have a required ratings and warnings systems and tags so that you can exclude works that have themes or content within them that you don’t want to see.

If you don’t like what the site is showing you, you are using it improperly.

There is no such thing as ‘a little censorship’

The above tagger has subjects they dislike; they need to learn to navigate around them so they don’t need to interact. That’s why tagging is so important: allowing the work to be found or avoided as needed.

The problem with ‘a little censorship’ is…endless. You want to control what other people are doing: how do you not see how that’s fucked to begin with?

You want to remove the ‘gross’ or the ‘inappropriate’ subjects, like that isn’t wholly subjective. Incest bothers you? Don’t read incest.

I can’t typically do fics with cheating, but I am not about to go tell the folks who write it that they can’t, purely to make me feel better. My eldest hates unhappy endings, they don’t get to dig up sad ending fics and yell at the author. My middle kid likes a different ship than I do in pretty much all of our common media. I don’t get to tell him he can’t read it anymore.

Fancy, emotionally charged buzzwords don’t change the fact that yeah, all of those are the same concept. You don’t like it, someone else is writing it, others are reading it, and that bothers you. That’s on you, my dear.

You will never have the right to tell someone else they cannot read or write it purely because you dislike it.

Learn to block, learn to filter, learn to accept that the real world has people who like things you do not.

This is the donut/diet argument all over again: you can’t have or dislike donuts, so you want to make sure no one else can have it either. Hard no, my friend. You have control only over yourself, and you need to remember that.

‘But those are bad things, I’m trying to get rid of the bad things only!’ No. They make you uncomfortable. There is a difference. Just as there is difference between reality and fiction. Just like what you think is bad may not, and probably will not, line up with someone else.

Fiction is not promoting rape, incest, whatever else. Kids aren’t going to go out and recreate things they’ve read for shits and giggles anymore than playing grand theft auto is going to make them join the fucking mafia or whatever it is. Sims players don’t suddenly rip their clothes off and drown in the pool, reading about Vash banging his brother a la Flowers in the Attic is hardly going to make someone knock on their actual brother’s door, etc etc etc ad nauseum.

More importantly: there is no end to ‘a little censorship’. Someone else gets to decide what I’m allowed to read and write, and the organizations with that aim have proven over and over and o v e r to be insane. Anything remotely queer is banned for being Bad or Sexualized (because these people have learned that PROTECT THE KIDS is the easiest way to rally the ignorant masses into believing that the rainbow is somehow preying on children… and thus need to be Controlled…)

You don’t want incest, you don’t want no con, someone else doesn’t want any form of kink, a third busybody can’t stand that boys kiss boys, a fourth can’t handle trans characters, another carves out the ace spectrum, yet more go after the stories exploring gender dynamics in the ABO verse.

That’s not even getting into politics, where it turns into now no one can post stories that explore changes in government, that are anti war, that are hopepunk and show all the ways society could be better. Or, on the opposite spectrum, things akin to the anarchist’s cookbook: how to make weaponry to forcibly make things change.

Oh, can’t have books that talk about different religions, either. Can’t have books that let girls know they should be treated equally, that they can do whatever they please, that they’re more than a walking baby factory. can’t have stories with magic, that’ll lead to evil thoughts. Can’t have stories with explicitly consensual anything, gotta keep the population pure and filled with shame about their desires. (There is a reason so many romance novels have a bit of unsavory shenanigans: the thrill of being wanted so overwhelmingly in a world where feeling that want means you are Not a Good Girl)

We’re living this, right now, again.

This is why knowing your history is so important.

Look at books have that been banned, burned. I’m going to oversimplify but: Picture books (and tango makes 3) because two male penguins adopted a baby, and we can’t let our kids know that’s acceptable, never mind that I, a child of a lesbian, literally bawled my eyes out upon finding that book in my twenties. I would read it every day to my own toddlers, because look! They’re like Awa and Gramma! 1984, because the entire point is how burning books is Bad. Animal Farm, the new government is just as bad as the old and we the people deserve better. Gone With the Wind, for being about the American south and not only making it seem like maybe slavery is kinda meh but also hinting at a woman having a sexuality. The scandal. Harry Potter. Not because JK turned out to be transphobic trash, but because it’ll turn kids into satanists, y’know, because of all the magic. A thing that is totally real and possible to recreate. Are you there god, it’s me, Margaret. Because it talked about menstrual cycles.

As an American, seeing headlines where kids are banned from the library because of policies like this is terrifying. Kids in Florida have zero books in the classroom. They have to be screened to be considered ‘appropriate’. And that means whitewashed, bland, and unchallenging of the norms the neo nazis are pushing. Can’t have anything about the struggles of the non white populace, can’t have anything at all about the queers, can’t have anything that paints the south in a bad light.

There is a bill currently attempting to pass into law, KOSA: kids online safety act. Under the guise of ‘protect the kids’ the government here is literally attempting to sanitize and censor the entire internet, for everyone. AO3 will be on the list of places they’re going to try and nuke. Yeah, even your cute vanilla super straight happy ever afters. All in the name of making sure imaginary little Johnny doesn’t think kissing boys, wearing pink, becoming friends with the Mexican kid down the street, or opposing genocide is acceptable behavior.

Censorship is not about protecting you, me, the mythical children, or anyone at all. It never has been.

Censorship is purely about control.

Censorship is about controlling your awareness, your intelligence, your ability to realize you are living in the worst timeline, and your ability to organize and fight back. Censorship is division. Censorship is deliberate cruelty meant to cripple you and make you malleable.

After all, you’ve given up your ability to explore new ideas, to think outside the box they’ve put you in. You are tamed, declawed, and too stupid to notice now. Don’t worry your pretty little blonde haired and blue eyed head about it now, Julie, the government will tell you want you need to know. Oh, what happened to your neighbor? Sweetie, what neighbor? No one was ever there. Repeat after me, no one was ever there.

AO3 is protecting my ability to read and write whatever the fuck I want, while giving me the search capabilities to NOT run into shit I dislike. AO3 is giving my teens a safe place to read and explore their own sexualities and interests, to engage in uncomfortable situations in a controlled way. AO3 is giving my teens a place to practice being human.

Censorship is always the bad guy.

AO3 is a fucking godsend, a pillar of creativity and freedom of engagement, and should be revered as such.

#censorship

i really like looking at google image searches for “firemen rescuing cats” or something because you get super cute pictures like

AND THEN THERE’S THIS ONE

“THAT’S RIGHT TWAS I that set the house ablaze!!!”

Dying.

Every fucking time I know what’s at the bottom and every time I still lose my shit.

I’m so happy this post is back again asdlkfjsa

HAPPY TEN YEARS TO “TWAS I THAT SET THE HOUSE ABLAZE”