✿ I'm Ellie ❃ use any pronouns ❀ exmormon ❁ terfs fuck off, I’m fucking queer ✾ I will tag stuff if asked ✽ I’ve been here since 2012 and I will be here til I die ❁ I don’t queue sorry ❋
My collection of 500+ four leaf clovers
There will also be handwringing about the future deaths of police, soldiers, settler officials and fascist settler vigilantes in the United States when the revolutionary struggle here continues to escalate. They will also call us animals and terrorists. They will use that framing to also justify great atrocities against the masses here.
You are witnessing a propaganda campaign that will serve as a model for United States fascism.
I'm not upset that blu-rays are being phased out. Formats all become obsolete and then die out.
My worry is there is not an adequate replacement for physical media. If you stream a 4K movie, it is usually over compressed and has a lossy audio track. Usually the quality *improves* when you move on to the next thing. But in this case, only the convenience is improved.
And there is no way to truly own the media you buy online. Even on Amazon when you "buy" something, that just means you have indefinite access to the file on their server. But if they lose the rights to that content or decide to delete it for tax purposes, you lose it too.
There is a service called Kaleidescape. It allows you to download blu-ray quality movie files onto local storage. Unfortunately the service has way too many caveats. You can only play the movies on their proprietary equipment. If they go out of business you will lose all of your movie purchases. And while they have a lot of mainstream, big budget movies, their selection is far from vast.
Oh, and their hardware starts at $8,000 and each movie is between $10 and $30 to purchase. And if you want to save more than 125 movies, the cost balloons to nearly $20K for the hardware.
The quality issue will eventually solve itself. New codecs like AV1 and H.266 will allow files to be compressed without losing any quality.
But I have no idea what to do about being unable to truly own your media. No studio will agree to DRM-free downloads that you can store anywhere and play with any device.
Maybe they can create a system where you can register any device you own and be allowed to play the file on those registered devices. So you get a file you can download, but the DRM requires verification you own the device it is being played on.
Perhaps they could designate a few cloud storage services as approved download platforms. You are free to shift your media from cloud to cloud, but it must always stay on the cloud and be registered to you. That way if a cloud storage company bites the dust, you still have the option to move your media to another place.
It's not as good as DRM-free local storage, but I don't see studios agreeing to anything else.
In truth, people are probably never going to buy movies in the future. If you have the option to rent for $3 or buy for $20, people probably aren't going to see the value in spending that much to own a movie.
Maybe the solution lies in some kind of law. If a platform no longer wishes to host a show or movie and they can't sell it to another streaming service, then they must give up the rights and allow the Library of Congress to save and distribute it.
Anonymous asked:
Johns get the wall.
askfucktoyfelix answered:
Many of my clients were just touch starved people in a culture that is deeply alienating to natural human intimacy. I imagine my interactions with my clients weren’t all that different from how massage therapists, beauticians, and hair stylists interact with their clients. My job was to serve a sexual fantasy, sure, but I also found myself just holding people, and listening to them. Teaching them how to be okay with vulnerability, their bodies and themselves. My clients were one of the best and most treasured parts of my work.
The only real difference is that people find sex to be uniquely evil and horrible. The biggest risk to me was always fear of the police. I couldn’t run as much risk management as I would have liked because I needed to stay under the radar. It wasn’t easy to run business out of a consistent, safe location. I was lucky this didn’t get me into a dangerous situation. Sex workers are the only people qualified to talk about how to resolve issues that sex workers face.
this might be because I’m a family law lawyer and also an old crone who remembers when marriage equality wasn’t a thing (as in, marriage equality only became nation-wide two months before I went to law school), but I have Strong Feelings about the right to marry and all the legal benefits that come with it
like I’m all for living in sin until someone says they don’t want to get married because it’s ~too permanent~ and in the same breath start talking about having kids or buying a house with their significant other. then I turn into a 90-year-old passive-aggressive church grandma who keeps pointedly asking when the wedding is. “yes, a divorce is very sad and stressful, but so is BEING HOMELESS BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT ENTITLED TO EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION OF MARITAL PROPERTY, CAROLINE!”
“oh, he thinks a piece of paper shouldn’t define your relationship? ASK HIM HOW HE FEELS ABOUT BEING ON YOUR BABY’S BIRTH CERTIFICATE, PATRICIA.”
“oh, sure, it’s all fun and games until your estranged parents are making medical decisions for you and inheriting all your property, TIMOTHY.”
so, I’ve gotten this question and similar ones before, and I want to use it to go into what marriage actually is.
so, in law, there are a couple of legal assumptions made when someone is a close family member, like a parent. the assumptions are that this person knows you well enough to make decisions on your behalf in an emergency, supports or is supported by you financially, and, most importantly, that they are emotionally significant to you in a way that makes them different from a total stranger or a good friend. immigration law, for example, prioritizes families over people immigrating for jobs alone, because not getting a job doesn’t have the same emotional weight as never seeing your mom again.
the difference is that you don’t get to choose your family (outside of adoption and, uh, legally that’s not a bilateral decision). you do get to choose your spouse. the fact that you chose them is why they get priority for things like inheritance and immigration, even over your parents or your siblings or your grandma.
how does the government know that this particular person is someone you want to have as part of your family? you fill out a form and you tell them.
what happens if you don’t want them in your family anymore, and don’t want those assumptions made about them? you fill out a different form and you tell the government that.
the thing I think that’s hard for people to wrap their heads around – whether you’re a starry-eyed romantic or a pragmatic bitch like me – is that marriage isn’t an announcement of how much you love someone. that’s what a facebook status update is for. you do not need to be in love, or sexually/romantically monogamous, or be religious, or any of the other things people associate with marriage, in order to be married.
it’s a legal decision. it is choosing to get certain benefits (like taxes, because it’s assumed you’re financially supporting each other) in exchange for certain responsibilities (because it’s assumed you’re supporting each other, it stops mattering exactly who bought what after you got married, so divorce splits the whole pool of stuff even if one person bought like 75% of it).
you don’t get the one without the other, and you don’t get either if you don’t affirmatively say that’s what you want to have happen. it doesn’t happen automatically, or in every romantic relationship no matter how serious, because the choice is the point.
and, to be clear: if you do not want, or do not care about, the legal rights and responsibilities of being married, you should not get married. it’s a fucking legal contract that has serious legal implications! it’s not something you should be doing for funsies!
tl;dr: if you want all the shit that comes with a marriage, good and bad, you need to tell the government that’s what you want. if you don’t want it, then you don’t need to do it, but you need to also be aware of what you’re potentially losing (in exchange for what you’re keeping). that should be an informed decision, not one you make for emotional reasons like “I just want everyone to know I’m only having sex with this person forever” or “our love is so pure it transcends legal boundaries.”
Is there any option other than marriage for telling the government you want this person to be part of your family? Like, can you draw up some kind of homebrew contract?
Short answer: No. If there was, queer people would have done it already.
Long answer: That’s a little like asking “can you become a citizen via contract rather than going through the immigration and naturalization process?” Marriage is a legal status: you either are or you aren’t. Can you cobble together very specific stuff, like advanced healthcare directives and wills and whatnot? Yes, absolutely. But anything that requires you to be legally married as a status cannot be contracted away: you can’t file taxes jointly or sponsor someone for a green card or get someone’s Social Security benefits if they die if you’re not married to that person.
Now, to be clear: some things that often require marriage do not always require marriage. For example, usually you need to be married to have someone unrelated to you be on your health insurance, but my job’s specific health insurance plan allows coverage for domestic partners, which they define as a single person who has cohabitated with you for six months or more and is in a committed relationship with you. So even though my fiancé and I are not married yet, he’s been on my health insurance for the past year and a half, because we hit the six month mark of living together right around when I had to re-enroll in my health insurance for the year.
But if we’d gotten married sooner, he’d have been able to get on my health insurance right away (getting married is a qualifying event that lets someone get on a health insurance plan outside of the enrollment period), but since he’s just a cohabitating partner, we had to wait six months for him to get on my insurance. And if he’d moved in with me a month later, we’d have to wait a whole year before he could enroll with me on my health insurance. Even though it’s allowed, it still doesn’t have the same standing as a marriage.
I guess technically adult adoption is an option, in that it is what queer people did for a while in lieu of marriage, but it’s a bad idea for a lot of reasons (not least of which being that you can divorce a spouse but you can’t undo an adoption).
this, THIS is why QPR make me so fucking nervous. i’m not trying to shit on your beautiful poly aroace love affair, i’m asking you HOW WILL THIS RELATIONSHIP HOLD UP IN COURT. cause, news flash: it won’t.
if you have shared bank accounts and a house and a kid with someone who isn’t married to you, they can wipe you out – legally speaking – and you have no recourse. none. you will never see your kid again, unless you’re lucky and contributed half their DNA.
if they have a car accident and end up in hospital, you don’t have a legal right to see them. if they’re in a coma, their parents can pull the plug and adopt that child and you can do nothing.
queers wanted marriage equality not to Be Like Teh Hets, but because it is the most legal protection you can ever have against that bad stuff that comes (and it comes for everyone).
if you don’t have that stuff, if you’re relying on your partners to do the right thing forever and be perfect people and never have a business collapse or a messy family situation or an accident or even to get sick … you’re being really, really naïve.
Pre-legal-gay-marriage, I saw this happen. I was on a parenting board and one day a woman we’d posted with for years told us her partner and one of their children had died in a car accident. And because she wasn’t the biological parent of the surviving child – the child she’d been a parent to since conception – her ex’s parents took custody and took the child away and kept her from seeing that child. Ever.
Because here’s the thing: children are not property. Specifically, in estate law, children are not, and cannot be “Real Property.” You cannot bequeath them like furniture, books, and bank accounts.
“But my will states who I want as guardian!” You say.
Welp. That statement is, in law, only a (strong) suggestion. A judge still still have to rule on guardianship of your minor child, and you cannot, from the grave, dictate where they end up.
Again: Children are not real property. If you are not their biological or legal parent, the state can remove them from your custody and hand them to someone more closely related, or not related at all but merely less gay, less queer, less “inappropriate” by your state’s legal standards.
The woman I knew back then was on good term with her not-quite-in-laws. Or thought she was. Because as soon as her partner died, their tune changed 100%, they found anti-gay legal support, and they took that woman’s child from her. Forever.
That’s not my only “my outlaws are great and fine with us and its okay we’re not legally married” story, but it’s probably the most heartbreaking. Though the image of a man who has just lost his partner of 25 years watching his ex-outlaws take ½ of his chairs, ½ of his pillows, ½ of his sheets, ½ of his napkins, ½ of his towels, ½ of his dishes, ½ of his books….. is pretty fucking close. After they made him sit behind “the family” at his partner’s funeral.
My mother was a lifelong Republican, a very conservative Catholic. The thing that pushed her over on legalizing gay marriage was stories about people being in the hospital and their partner of 20 years not being allowed to see them, because they weren’t legally married. She thought that was wrong and unfair.
Also a reminder “get married” does not mean “have a wedding.” You can file the paperwork and get married in a courthouse or office. There doesn’t even need to be a ceremony, you just have to sign some papers. (Bonus: you get access to the legal privileges of marriage as well as the protections, AND you get to stick it to the billion dollar “wedding industry” that preys on us all.)
this is why I hate posts like “LGBT+ people who want to get married are just assimilationist and throwing the True Queers under the bus!!!”
no, you dipshit, we want spousal rights under the law
305 notes for made up shit from a guy who listens to way too many podcasts. the average israeli is not blake flayton and people are not "fleeing back to their homelands" in any significant numbers. why is it that you need the true things described here - the power asymmetry, that gazans are living in an open air prison, that israel subjects them to continuous, genocidal murder sprees - to be enveloped by this fantasy? is shitposting so fun right now that you don't mind whether it's true or not?
i can't tell if this is a joke. there are 300,000 american jews in palestine
If you think that’s bad you should see this post that got over 2,000 notes
Israel was litterally created because europe wanted us out of their countries and refused to give back the land and property they stole from holocaust victims. the us was turning away shoah survivors. israel destablizied the countries around them to force jews to immigrate to israel. Not all of the jewish settlers are ashkenazi! some are sephardic and mizrahi and ethiopian and tunisan (and have v little resources to flee bc of israeli oppression)
none of this absolves the settlers of their violence but we dont need to use fucking antisemitic dog whistles of dual loyalty and like NYC Elites to do that!!
The only Swiftie worth a damn is the one that got locked up for two years for refusing to join the IDF
I have to tell you about the Abuela on my street.
She is nearly 70 years old, with wonderfully brown gnarled, wrinkled hands and eyes that are creased from smiling. She hand-makes all of her own clothes and sews dolls for my little sister. Abuela is very lonely… her husband already passed and her kids live far away. She misses her grandkids. Abuela comes around our place for the company almost every other day.
So this morning, my little sister and I went to visit the Abuela to return the kindness of her vegetables with some homemade soup.
It’s a funny joke we have, that if you can make a perfect posole you are wife material. I was joking around with my friend beforehand to see if I was worthy of marriage, and my little sister thinks me failing is the best thing in life, so of course she wants to ask Abuela when we arrive.
We’re wearing masks and gloves and can’t give her the big hug like we want to, but Abuela is always happy to see us. We bring the pot of soup to her table. My little sis, the little shit that she is, immediately asks, “Abuela, is Reina ready to be a wife yet?”
And Abuela immediately shifts her entire mood. Her face literally becomes this:
Abuela’s look pierces through my heart.
“Who are you trying to impress? A man or a woman?” she asks, deadly serious. We have broached the topic of marriage. It is her domain now.
And I, Rei, gay as the fourth of July, cannot believe that either Abuela clocked me instantly or that she could possibly have a fascinating past of her own.
I thought about lying, but my little sister was there and I don’t like to lie in front of her. So I was honest and said I was trying to impress a woman.
Without a response, Abuela carefully tries the posole. The room is silent.
“For a man, it’s good,” she says after a moment. “But, you’ll need to work harder to impress a woman.”
All I can do is politely nod. I have so many questions.
Now Abuela is tired. She wants to eat and relax in peace, so she waves us away. We make sure she’s settled, and then my sister and I go home.
I can’t believe my 70 year old Abuela said BI RIGHTS
so yeah that fire in Lahaina, Maui? That was what indigenous activists were trying to prevent. That is why Land Back movements wants indigenous people to be the stewards of the land that was once theirs. Not kick out white people and settlers. But to prevent shit like that where a bunch of tourists/settlers won't destroy the planet in their ruthless pursuit of productivity and profit. So yeah, think on that.
People are asking how was this white people fault?
Power lines, in Hawaii they are owned by Blackrock and Vanguard, keep catching on fire because they forget to turn off their shitty electricity. So when they eventually topple over, white people forgot to cut the Guinea grass planted by colonizers 200 years to feed cows which changed Lahaina from a a swampland to the fucking tinderbox that it is today.
But hey, grass is grass and no need to mow an invasive species, right colonizers? Oh shit, that global warming that these fucking oil companies spent decades telling us wasn’t real is real and that dried up the land in Maui?
Now motherfuckers are trying to buy land off of the indigenous people in Maui because colonizers just love having part time homes, right?
But yay let’s celebrate the fucking billionaires who own homes in Lahaina because they are donating. Nope, no fucking correlation there right?
Indigenous Hawaiians have been saying how tourism is killing their islands for over a decade yet you fucking assholes keep mentioning how Tourism is the point of Hawaii as if that culture wasn’t just about living instead of living for profit.
They don’t want you there but you fuckheads insist of making it your timeshare goal. So yeah. It’s absolutely settler’s fault that this shit happening.
ALT
[ID: British organ donor card from the 80s with a sticker on it reading "To hospital authorities: if I am injured in a major disaster I do not wish to be visited by Margaret Thatcher"]
Reblogging to curse the next nurse using patients for tiktok clout
western journalist *and* the president of the united states
and then later, as reported by WaPo
This is the kind of shit gnomes drink their tea from. Jsyk. But it's little so it's like a life sized snail and sometimes they pick up an actual snail by accident and have a little giggle about it. Can you hear me is this thing on
Are you aware that Google is currently being sued by the DOJ for being an illegal monopoly, in conjunction with almost fourty states?
Yes, I am aware
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN GOOGLE IS BEING SUED
Other (leave in tags)
