dsudis: bomberqueen17 replied to your post

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dsudis:

bomberqueen17 replied to your post “bastlynn replied to your post “My dad called me up out of the blue…”

my folks finding out i write erotica is maybe the Most Terrifying Thing in my World so this little plot twist has been sort of delightful and sort of mindfucky to read! *thumbs up emoji*

Okay so clearly it is once again time to trot out The Story of How I Told My Dad I Write Gay Porn, because that particular cat has been out of the bag for twelve years (which is how this caught me off guard! HE’S NEVER READ ANY OF IT BEFORE.)

ohh my god (also we must be v. similar ages, I also was in a similar place in 2004, and had a sibling deployed! would that she’d had an LJ, we relied on very sporadic emails which were Not Reassuring when there was a communications blackout) that is a Worthy Epic. Phenomenal punchline. 

I love this whole story. You’re great and your dad sounds like a delight.

My folks are. Well. Not. Like that really. I mean. My mom is… how do I put this. I mean. She went door-to-door for SDS in college circulating a petition against the Vietnam War, but hadn’t really been into politics ever since. Meanwhile, my dad was a (volunteer!) Infantry lieutenant in the same war. They did not know one another yet. They did not meet until nearly ten years later. Dad remains Catholic, Mom remains not-Catholic. They sometimes make a mutual pact not to vote in elections because they’d cancel one another out. They have a deal where they just don’t talk about politics with one another. (This past election, for the first time ever, Mom extended that deal and said “you do not discuss politics in my earshot, because that man is a horrifying misogynist and you have four daughters and I cannot believe you would countenance a single thing he or anyone allied with him would say.” Which was a bit shocking to everyone! Apparently Dad agreed to it because they’re still married.)

But. I mean. Neither of them is particularly “woke” in any fashion; my mother knitted a bunch of pussy hats for the Women’s March but completely cannot grasp the entire concept of a transgender person of any kind, for example, and doesn’t get what the big deal is about Black Lives Matter etc., so. She’s sort of vaguely liberal but not exactly… committed to it. (She told me in high school that if I decided I was a lesbian I should be willing to accept that it might be a phase. Thanks, Mom! I only told her I was bi because I was on the verge of getting expelled from school for it, so. I just Never Discussed That with my father, not even when my girlfriend visited our house from overseas.)

And also my mother spent a lot of my life instilling in me a visceral horror of ever telling anyone I wanted, was interested in, or particularly enjoyed anything I genuinely was attached to, so. If they know I like something it’s because I find it vaguely amusing. If I’m obsessed with something, nobody knows.

It’s not the gayness I worry about telling them about, particularly. It’s just admitting to anyone really in my life that I genuinely am super into something that mortifies me to death. (I did link one of my gay fanfictions to one of my sisters, since I stole her apartment and cats and a story that happened to her as the premise of it, but she never got around to reading it, so actually I didn’t, apparently, out myself.)

withsugarandlime: pips-chooks: I’m happy to

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withsugarandlime:

pips-chooks:

I’m happy to report the Preening Parlour open for business 🐓

GUESS WHAT

CHICKEN BUTT

I am not the pop-culture-savviest person ever. I had probably...

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I am not the pop-culture-savviest person ever. I had probably heard this song before, but not that I could remember. So at some point today, I said something about wanting candy to my coworker, and being as he is, he did not reach for the obvious musical reference, but instead sang shrilly “I’ll give you fish! I’ll give you candy!”

… wut, I said, whereupon he realized I genuinely didn’t get the reference, so we had to listen to not only this song but also the entire record. (Worse fates; at least it’s not Oingo Boingo again. They’re fine, just not for eight solid hours, my friends. Mostly, having a former college radio DJ for a deskmate is great, but sometimes, not so much.)

And so I listened to this song. Coworker said that there were rumors that Kate Pearson’s boyfriend once got eaten by a shark, and that was the reason for the chorus, but he’d never actually seen the rumor verified.

Nerd that I am, I was instantly overwhelmed by the memory of, I think it’s the last paragraph of The Cloud Roads, where Jade asks Moon if she should get him any courtship gifts. 

He considers it, and then suggests, “Fish?”

I don’t think it was meant to be a B-52s reference but if it is, I just got it, literally five years later, so go me!

John Deere just told the copyright office that only corporations can own property, humans can only l

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torrilin:

quasi-normalcy:

noctumsolis:

dr-archeville:

John Deere has turned itself into the poster-child for the DMCA, fighting farmers who say they want to fix their own tractors and access their data by saying that doing so violates the 1998 law’s prohibition on bypassing copyright locks.

Deere’s just reiterated that position to a US Copyright Office inquiry on the future of the law, joined by auto manufacturers (but not Tesla) and many other giant corporations, all of them arguing that since the gadgets you buy have software, and since that software is licensed, not sold, you don’t really own any of that stuff.  You are a licensee, and you have to use the gadget according to the license terms, which spell out where you have to buy your service, parts, consumables, apps, and so on.

As software eats the world, it’s devouring the idea of private property – “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”

The fact that the DMCA felonizes bypassing copyright locks, combined with the proliferation of copyrighted software in gadgets means that companies can turn their commercial preferences into private laws.  Just design your gadget so that using is in any way apart from the official, prescribed way requires breaking a copyright lock.  Now, anyone who violates your license terms is also committing a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

For a first offense.

What’s more, security researchers who reveal defects in these gadgets face the same harsh punishment, and routinely self-censor, even when they find potentially life-threatening bugs in medical implants or cars.

Other automakers pointed out that owners who make unsanctioned modifications could alter their vehicles in bad ways.  They could tweak them to go faster.  Or change engine parameters to run afoul of emissions regulations.

They’re right.  That could happen.  But those activities are (1) already illegal, and (2) have nothing to do with copyright.  If you’re going too fast, a cop should stop you — copyright law shouldn’t.  If you’re dodging emissions regulations, you should pay EPA fines — not DMCA fines.  And the specter of someone doing something illegal shouldn’t justify shutting down all the reasonable and legal modifications people can make to the things they paid for.

GM went so far as to argue locking people out helps innovation.  That’s like saying locking up books will inspire kids to be innovative writers, because they won’t be tempted to copy passages from a Hemingway novel.  Meanwhile, outside of Bizarroland, actual technology experts — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation — have consistently labeled the DMCA an innovation killer.  They insist that, rather than stopping content pirates, language in the DMCA has been used to stifle competition and expand corporate control over the life (and afterlife) of products.

We Can’t Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership [Kyle Wiens/Wired] 

W T F ?

This is important stuff. As important as anything else happening under the Trump regime.

These people are trying to take away your right to own anything.
Others are trying to legislate that all rights extend from, and are subordinate to, property rights.

Between them, they’re trying to strip you of all rights. To make you less that serfs.

FIGHT this.
Petition.
Protest.
Boycott.

You can’t let this happen.

Anyways, this one goes out to everyone who’s afraid of socialism because they will lose their private property

One of the most important ideas in copyright law is that copyright is a LIMITED benefit. It’s explicit that it isn’t supposed to last forever. Same goes for patents.

So yup, I oppose Deere’s argument in this case.

Exploitation and Abuse at the Chicken Plant

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Getting on a plane tomorrow, will be out of town all

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Getting on a plane tomorrow, will be out of town all week (it’s a working semi-vacation, helping my older sister pack up her entire life and three kids to move out of state, but there’s sunshine so y’know), so I don’t know when I’ll have literally any of my projects updated again.

So here’s a lil teaser snippet bit, because the next Lost Kings bit is the introduction of Yavin IV as a setting and kind of, as a character. (This is the upshot of what I could figure out after asking for help on how a moon would be as a place to live!)

Kes managed to wedge himself into the cockpit to watch their approach to the Rebel base at Yavin IV. The droid eyed him speculatively, but said nothing. Andor was busy, on the comms getting them clearance to approach, and listening in return, the chatter too low for Kes to hear.

Yavin IV was a moon orbiting an uninhabitable gas giant, and earlier when he’d asked, K2 had rattled off a bunch of statistics and facts about the place. Something about a vanished people with ancient ruins, exterminated by some other long-gone tribe. It all felt vaguely familiar like he’d heard the story before, but it wasn’t anything Kes could concretely recall. He was getting a lot of that, and Andor had, not reassuringly, mentioned that was a common side-effect of the hallucinations the IT-0 droids inspired. The pervasive unreality, the sense that everything had already happened– those were the things that drove most survivors of the interrogations mad. So, Andor had said, perhaps too sunnily, the fact that Kes was aware that wasn’t right was pretty hopeful in terms of him continuing to adjust and overcome the trauma, no?

Sure, Kes had said, but he was watching the purple and swirling red hulk of the gas giant fill their viewscreen with an uneasy feeling that he’d seen a holo like this once and everyone in it had died. Surely that wasn’t right.

“It’s night, now,” K2 said, in what he probably thought was a reassuring tone. “I mean, at our destination, it’s night.”

“I got that,” Kes said. “Thanks.”

“The orbit of the moon around the gas giant means that night is a variable concept, however,” K2 went on. “The moon is tidally locked to the planet so half of it is always lit up by reflected light from the planet, and that’s the side the base is on. At the moment, it’s between the planet and the sun, so it’s dark, but not totally dark because of the reflection.” He followed this up with a recitation of percentages of reflected light from the different surfaces of the gas giant, which then affected light levels on the moon. It was more numbers than Kes could follow.

He wondered if maybe Andor just tuned the droid out sometimes, if that was how he maintained his sanity. “Gotcha,” he settled for saying, the next time there was a pause. Andor showed no sign of having heard any of their chatter.

“I’m just saying,” the droid went on. “If you wanted to practice your freakish orienteering skills, you’d have a nice night for it.”

“Let’s hope my welcome’s not so chilly I find the need to,” Kes said, not sure if he was meant to be amused or taken aback.

Andor slipped one of the earphones off and said, “You might want to find a seat or hang on, in case we land rough.”

Kes considered going back to the cargo area, but there were no viewports back there, and he wanted to keep his eyes on something so he didn’t hallucinate. So he wedged himself behind the droid’s chair and hung on, watching as they swung around the gas giant and closed in on a green, green world. They flew over an ocean, dotted with rocky islands, and then came down through the atmosphere with only a little bumpiness, and burst through a cloud layer radiant with light reflected from the gas giant.

“That’s beautiful,” Kes said, astonished. Pearlescent darkness opened out below them, heavy shadows that he couldn’t help but read as forested areas, limned in pastel silvery-purple reflections glinting from bodies of water. Ahead, as they descended, a heavy shadow loomed, like perhaps a thick forest or mountains, velvet-dark.

Andor glanced back. “It’s pretty,” he said, “but desolate. There’s no one on this planet but us.”

“There are life-forms,” K2 corrected him, “but no sentients.”

“Also it’s humid and buggy as fuck,” Andor said. “And there are bugs and things that will actually eat you.”

Kes grinned, and after a moment Andor glanced back. “You would like that,” he said. “I should have guessed.”

Photo

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… so we’re leaving tomorrow and

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… so we’re leaving tomorrow and there’s nothing in the fridge so i said well takeout or eat out for dinner yeah? and dude was like let’s go out, and i’m like ok, chilling in jeans and a flannel thinking about where i want to go, and dude says, we could go somewhere fancy! and I’m like oh, I suppose we could, and he mentions a fancy place I’d been wanting to revisit. And so I was idly thinking, guess I’ll put on a nicer shirt with these jeans… 

and then i hear water running in the bathroom and oh, swishing noises, oh– dude is shaving, that’s a big deal. (he wears a goatee and tidies up around it very infrequently)

oh it might

it might be date night

maybe i need to put on some fancy underpants.