Sudan still desperately needs aid--it needs a lot of things, but it is approaching a dangerous point with famine and mass death due to hunger imminent.

These are the kinds of headlines we're getting now:

Here's an ongoing fundraiser:

I linked it before, to help with Ramadan, but it's an ongoing initiative, the need has not stopped.

I picked this gofundme because it's been boosted by people I trust and you can see pictures online of the food they've provided, e.g.:

But I also picked this because you can see the amount of donations. It's 2pm ET on Saturday, April 20th right now? For the next week, whatever's donated, I'll match for a total up to $2,000 (we'll say 2,750 CAD, since the gofundme is in Canadian dollars).

You don't have to send me a receipt, I just ask that you donate and boost.

Sudan still desperately needs aid--it needs a lot of things, but it is approaching a dangerous point with famine and mass death due to hunger imminent.

These are the kinds of headlines we're getting now:

Here's an ongoing fundraiser:

I linked it before, to help with Ramadan, but it's an ongoing initiative, the need has not stopped.

I picked this gofundme because it's been boosted by people I trust and you can see pictures online of the food they've provided, e.g.:

But I also picked this because you can see the amount of donations. It's 2pm ET on Saturday, April 20th right now? For the next week, whatever's donated, I'll match for a total up to $2,000 (we'll say 2,750 CAD, since the gofundme is in Canadian dollars).

You don't have to send me a receipt, I just ask that you donate and boost.

”my blorbo is unpopular” this “my blorbo is the causer of all discourse” that. I’m under an unofficial NDA so i am Literally not allowed to talk about this blorbo

LEAVE IT IN MY ASK BOX KING!! I WANNA LEARN!!!

NO READ MY POST AGAIN. I WASN’T JOKING ABOUT MY NDA.

my blorbo is frommy semi-official gig.

How are you under an NDA about a blorbo

semi-official gig, very early into development, not trying to leak stuff and such. Then again it’s very easy for me to get attached to fictional little guys it was gonna happen sooner or later

I THOUGHT THIS WAS A JOKE WHEN I FIRST READ IT

THIS IS REALLY FUNNY

GO OFF BESTIE

ALSO TELL US ABOUT YOUR BLORBO YJE MILLISECOND YOU CAN

I WILL ANNOUNCE WHEN I AM ALLOWED TO I PROMISE

FORBIDDEN BLORBO IM IN STITCHES

PREV TAGS DO NOT MAKE THIS 10K NOTES

one thanks for respecting the nda. Two,

This post has been magentad!

woah thats crazy chat. anyway Ten Thousand Notes am i right chatters

Tumblr, you know what to do

Let's Talk About Missing Persons

So, I've seen this post circulating last week, and a few others like it in the past year. I think this probably needs to be discussed every few years, and it feels like time.

First, a few caveats: there are reports on the post that Abby has been located and is fine, so no need to reblog and also that's great news, I'm very happy she is safe. Second, I did not especially doubt the veracity of the post, so I'm not impugning the people who made and posted it, but I also declined to reblog it for reasons I'll get into. Third, I know that especially in marginalized communities it can be dangerous to involve the police, and that Missing White Woman Syndrome means it can be difficult to get media coverage. I understand why Abby's community may have chosen to search for her in the way they did.

However, for everyone's safety, I do not link any missing persons post that requires you to contact an individual to report the missing person's whereabouts. If the poster doesn't ask you to contact the police or a known missing persons organization, I won't do it.

This is for the safety of the missing person.

When you see a post with someone's photo, name, and last known whereabouts, and you are asked to contact an individual -- a family member, partner, friend, etc -- what you are being asked to do is report on the whereabouts of one person you don't know to another person you don't know. You don't know that the person you're talking to isn't an abusive partner or parent, a stalker, or a person who means them material harm. One of the Insta accounts in the missing image doesn't appear to exist, and another has no bio and very little captioning on their images. I couldn't verify that Abby even knew these people.

Again: when I looked at the image, it looked sincere to me. I didn't doubt those people were earnestly searching for a friend they were worried about. But also, an abuser doesn't look like an abuser until they do. So I don't make exceptions, because a missing person is missing but a victim outed to their abuser has strong odds of being murdered. The most dangerous time in the life of an abused person is when they are leaving their abuser. Even if a victim simply logs on to say "Hey, I'm fine, these people mean me harm" the abuser has now flushed them out of hiding, and manipulated them into making a public statement.

If you can't verify positively that the person searching does not mean the missing person harm, you should not be circulating a post, full stop. At the very least, if the community doesn't wish for the help of the police (understandable) or can't get the help of an organization or community (frequent), the missing persons poster should advise you to speak to the missing person, not the searcher, and notify them they're being sought, as long as it's safe for both you and them to do so.

This isn't intuitive. We want to help, and search posters like that tug on the heartstrings. We know that when the police get involved even in something this innocuous, it can be perilous for everyone. But in situations where someone is so vulnerable, we have to concern ourselves first with harm reduction, which in this case means not spreading someone's photo with a stranger's contact information on it.

I'm glad Abby was found and is fine and that her searchers were in earnest. But that will not always be the case, and it's important to remember that.

Ngl i prefer the 2016 version purple on the right.

in which I watch other hobbies learn about the problem of getting consistent dye lots

@mamoru

what you have to understand is lamy dark lilac (2016, the real lamy dark lilac) still gets sold for hundreds of dollars per bottle by resellers when it originally sold for $10. and people bought it because they loved that limited edition ink so much. LDL is one of the grail inks for fountain pen ink collectors, and one of the most common reasons to mix fountain pen ink is to try to imitate it.

but the dyes used in the original lamy dark lilac are no longer even available, and it took several lamy representatives promising it was the exact same ink before anyone told the truth. and remember: THE DYES WERE NEVER AVAILABLE FROM THE START OF PRODUCTION. this is not a matter of inconsistency between batches, lamy knew that the ink would have to be completely different and they called it dark lilac anyway while several of their representatives communicated that it was the exact same ink.

people were fighting and fighting and fighting because it was obviously a different formula, it looked different, but lamy said it was the same, so the person doing the swab of the color must have been wrong, because lamy would never lie. and then when lamy admitted it was a completely different ink, there was fighting about whether or not it is wrong to call a product a re-release of the something while it is completely different. some lamy fans refuse to admit lamy can ever do anything wrong, when they do a ton of shit wrong.

there was no reason to call this ink a re-release of dark lilac other than as a cash grab for any sucker who had the gall to believe that when lamy calls something a re-release of one of the most beloved fountain pen inks of all time, that it would actually be the same ink.

I personally think that if you claim to be re-releasing one of the most famous inks in the world, it should actually be the same ink, or name it something different. lamy deep lilac. lamy new lilac. lamy green lilac because of the green sheen instead of the gold sheen lamy dark lilac became famous for. fucking, anything else

lamy is a piece of work, their quality control has been shit for years, and they make a ton of money by enshittifying their products for people who miss when they were less trash.

damn good thing the entire company just got bought out by mitsubishi pencil company.

Ok, but y'all.

On *high quality* paper? The color isn't even CLOSE to the original. Like, the photo that the WSJ is using doesn't even show it off at its best. If you look at a pen retailer's review, like Goulet Pens, here, there's a really good set of photos on different paper types (because with fountain pens that makes a heck of a difference, trust me).

To pull one image from the review I linked:

Like. Can you look at that and tell me they look even CLOSE to each other? (For folk not into fountain pens, Tomoe River paper - such as this - is considered the best paper you can use)

So yeah. There's RAGE at Lamy for daring to do this to us, even though it's a function of the original pigments no longer being available.

Age-old advice which is more relevant nowadays rather than less. This is the second iteration of it though. The original version is: “Never write anything in a letter you wouldn’t want to see in print.” Advice handed down by my mother from her forbears.

From the IT department. We archive EVERYTHING. And Outlook autosaves every couple seconds.

“Dance like no one is watching.  Email and text like it will one day be read in court.”

when programs fucking autocorrect <3 to ❤️ and :) to 😃,,,, do you have any idea what you’ve just done?? what you just fucking destroyed ?

A) It's irritating when systems turn lovely ascii art into crude little pictograms, and

😎 It's even more frustrating when you weren't actually trying to make an emoji.

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

sorry i cant hang out i forgot how to mimic human like behaviour

I mean if you wanna just loom in the corner like some kinda creature that's cool, we just don't want you getting left out

When I was a very tiny child my mom was in a local production of The Reluctant Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, a play where Arthur Conan Doyle is hired to investigate a murder at a haunted house with Sherlock Holmes, a figment of Doyle’s imagination that only he can see and hear. Doyle very sincerely believes that the house is haunted, and Holmes thinks that Doyle is a moron

I was too young to appreciate this concept when I was a child, now that I’m older it’s the best concept for a play I’ve ever heard in my life.

holy fuck I need to see that

I'm a huge fan of fancytier outfits, but at the end of the day the god tier outfits are pajamas, and it's important to the story.

You went to sleep and you never woke up. You are awake and you are new in ways you could never be before. You are you. You are not you. You can visit your own body at its final resting place. It looks like it's sleeping. You were a dream for as long as you can remember and now you are real. You've always been real. Are you still sleeping? Were you ever asleep at all? Your ascension cost so much, but there is no guarantee it was the right path. You are a god, and your vestments are so cozy and soft, and all you want to do is rest.

this is the position my right hand is in when i play minecraft. the group chat is murdering me for it. thoughts?

theyre bullying me 😔

they called me mumbo jumbo

a collection of my favorite tags

out here looking like the motion test on a video game

Everything is like “QUEER history” and “List of QUEER young adult books” or “Top 10 QUEER movies” and queer this and queer that and for the love of god please just say LGBT.

But queer is more inclusive

And faster to pronounce if you are talking instead of writing.

It’s not more inclusive, and if your excuse of using a slur as a blanket term is “it’s faster to say”, GENUINELY what is wrong with you

It’s called economía del lenguaje.

It’s also the respected academic term?? The acronym isn’t static and it’s usage is varied by things like generational difference, location, and knowledge of the community. Even just in the U.S. in the last few decades the common usage gone from GLBT to LGBT to LGBTQ, to LGBTQA/LGBTQIA/LGBTQIAP/etc (Which, let me tell you as someone who has given presentations in the past using these updated acronyms, are all real mouthfulls), to LGBT+.

Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.

Like yeah if you’re talking specifically about gay or trans people you can just say gay or transgender, but if you’re talking about more than one identity or someone who doesn’t conform to our perceptions of ‘LGBT,’ or a person or people whose identity you don’t know, queer is just the better word.

“That’s SO gay”, “Oh my god, you’re not a LESBIAN, are you?”

Your words are slurs, too. Why do you get your words, but I don’t get mine? What makes you so special?

I’m here, I’m queer, go fuck yourself.

queer is not a slur, stop drinking the TERF koolaid

every time one of you fools spout about ‘queer is a slur’ a terf laughs because their fucking plan to make that word ‘taboo’ is fucking working you dipshit.

I did not get my degree in queer literature for you all to keep pulling this bullshit.

baby gays,,,, i beg of you to learn your queer history and stop listening to terf bullshit

every single one of our labels has been used as a slur against us.

terfs and -phobes are always going to try and hurt us with what we identify as. but the fact remains these are OUR labels and always have been.

we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.

I don’t know if this is just because I’m not American but I’ve never heard queer used as a slur. Ever. Meanwhile gay was the insult in the 2000s here. Everything you didn’t like was ‘soo gay’. Queer wasn’t even a word most of us knew back then.

It just baffled me that people would think an identifier is automatically a slur just because someone uses it to mock someone. If we did that gay would be a slur. Stupid would be a slur. Autistic would be a slur.

The reason people are upset about the word queer is that it’s a unifying term. You can say you’re queer and all people will know is that you’re part of the community. But you can’t say you’re LGBT, you have to say you’re gay or trans or ace. They don’t want you to be ambiguously queer. They want you to say which kind of queer you are so they can decide whether you’re undesirable.

yeah in the 90s and early 2000s kids would call each other “gay” as an insult. But no one ties themselves in knots over whether “gay” is a slur. So yeah, please ffs learn your history.

They want you to say which kind of queer you are so they can decide whether you’re undesirable.

I love how much ppl hate Deepnest because I find it so calming somehow. Like wow...nice ambiance. Pretty glowy mushrooms. And look at all these darling little creatures. This one's wearing a red cloak like Hornet! Garpedes are so cool...wonder where they're going. I'm gonna pet a Stalking Devout

Pets love to show up like Hello i am Mystery Wet :)

Me: "Cat, why? Where has this tail been?"

Cat: "Perhaps I explored the tub after your shower. Perhaps I sat too close to the sink. Perhaps it is pee. I love our little mysteries."