idk, I think it’s worth stopping to recognize how incredibly fucking weird it is how there’s this whole segment of the population who spend an inordinate amount of their time and attention just absolutely obsessing over their hatred of trans people. Rowling is the public face of it but she’s hardly alone.
I listened to it and it’s genuinely not bad (on a content and voice synthesis level), to the point that I have a hard time believing it was entirely AI-generated. If it’s not a fake ghostwritten by the creators, it must have been heavily rerolled and edited to make it so coherent.
It’ll result in the industry moving to nations with more permissive scraping laws (like Japan) or less respect for Western copyright (Russia, China).
And a significant part of the remainder are repost bots recycling old popular posts and comments in order to farm karma, which will eventually be sold to OnlyFans spammers, political ops, and corporate shills.
It’s an organic community, small enough and long-lasting enough that it’s easier to get to know people as people instead of as names on a screen you’ll see once and likely never again. The admin team is similarly small and easy to talk to, not an algorithm or a faceless corporate enforcer. The mods are paid professionals funded largely by community donations. The site is also in the process of transitioning to a non-profit management, so less risk of selling out or enshittifying itself. I like the posting and commenting culture – text-heavy, minimalist style, and a wide variety of topics often deeply researched and explored in lengthy posts by people passionate about the topic, rather than 24/7 outrage-bait headlines and viral videos. And the subsites are really fun – I mentioned AskMeFi, but there’s also a place to share one’s music, personal projects, discuss media, organize meetups, etc. I also appreciate how the mods and guidelines take a strong stance against bigotry and microaggressions – hate speech and spam are virtually unheard of. Very refreshing when the bigger platforms seem intent on pursuing growth at all costs and minimizing administrative overhead. Overall, a cozy, human-scale community that seems more and more like a throwback that we should be moving back to.
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but my favorite eerie/creepy horror movie that doesn’t rely on jump scares or gore is The Mothman Prophecies. It’s about a journalist who stumbles across a small town haunted by this horrifying presence that seems to predict terrible disasters. The style is on point, and it’s especially creepy because it’s supposedly based on a true story.
MetaFilter! It’s an old-school text-only community blog that’s been around since 1999. I love the variety and depth of posts on the front page, and the AskMetaFilter Q+A section is super useful.
Like all fascist conspiracy theorists, it inevitably connects back to anti-Semitism.
Sinfest. Used to be a charming and funny daily webcomic about an eclectic cast of colorful characters getting into surreal and philosophical situations. Then one day in 2011 it suddenly swerved hard into radical feminism. I’m not anti-feminist myself, but the comic became obsessed with it – literally every strip was related to The Patriarchy in some way and it became extremely preachy and boring.
I checked out for the better part of a decade, and when I randomly revisited a couple years ago it turned out that the author had transited the TERF-to-fascist pipeline and turned into an extreme-right antivax conspiratorial fascist loon, of the “teachers are secret pedos” and “the war in Ukraine is a hoax” variety. Super sad to see.
There’s always going to be an activity difference given the userbase gap, but it’s a mistake imho to see a slow-paced community as “dead”. As long as it has active subscribers, any post will get votes and comments from people who see it, even if it’s been weeks or months since the last post in that community. Slower-paced, but still there for whatever content gets posted.
The irony is that the situation is pretty much the opposite of this – the US vetoed a symbolic, non-binding resolution for essentially messaging reasons (it didn’t explicitly acknowledge Israel’s right to self-defence), but when it comes to concrete action it’s providing millions in humanitarian relief, and Biden is pressuring Netanyahu privately and publicly to pull back from a full invasion and allow a relief corridor.
I get people not taking the IDF at face value, but Hamas ain’t exactly trustworthy, either.
I imagine given recent events that there was a lot of antisemitic hate speech coming from nominally pro-Palestinian people.
I’ll just switch to a Indian ip-address and buy a cheap premium
I’ve thought about doing this, but worry about it fucking up my recommendations, which I’m actually pretty happy with. Do you know if that’s an issue?
Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate – seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It’s a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that’s honestly pretty fair.
I fear this is going to be a turning point for the party to turn fully against Ukraine. McConnell apparently argued forcefully in favor of keeping the funding intact, but got overruled by most of the caucus, including Thune (one of the top candidates to replace him). And this is the Senate Republicans we’re talking about, the House caucus is even more openly antagonistic.
Keeping Democratic control of the White House and Congress next year could be key to Ukraine defeating Russia.
I've always gotten Moderna, and yeah, it sucks for like 36 hours. Headache, fever, chills, sore arms, fatigue. It passes pretty quickly though, and it's a hell of a lot better than getting COVID.
Just goes to show how one-note she’s gotten, that even the owner of the platform who’s no SJW and desperate to ingratiate himself to celebs is like, “can you give it a rest already?”
I scrolled through her feed to see how long before that was her last non-trans-related tweet and gave up after two dozen.