ceoln @ceoln@qoto.org

Tech company: "Our new product will blind you on purpose"

People: "Boooo!"

Tech company: "OK, OK, we've heard your concerns. Our new product will only blind you in one eye"

People: "Hoooray!"

Mother, I see you are putting away laundry. Which means the linen closet is likely to open up soon! Yay, I cannot wait to go into the linen closet!

Mother… you are finishing putting away the laundry, yet the linen closet… remains closed?

Mother, may I please be let into the linen closet? I promise I will be a good girl.

…

thank you 😻

pudding levels are 100% and falling

(100%) ■■■■■■■■■■

The D.C. Bar's board of Professional Responsibility recommended Rudy Giuliani be disbarred. Significantly, to me, they mention his effort to get election results in PA thrown out.

This is significant *to me* because much of my family live in PA and in 2020 they each worked methodically registering friends and family, and getting people to the polls.

Is literally their votes that he thought should be just thrown away. I take attempts to mess with my dear elderly mother voting PERSONALLY.

#introduction

Hello! I’m a musician/artist based in London, UK. The most recent time I had to describe what I do I said it was ‘acoustic and electronic improvised music, experimental composition, and DIY publishing.’

I improvise using baritone saxophone or live electronics, and my band Sloth Racket has been together since 2015. I make zines as tools for improvised performance, co-run the Luminous label, have been known to organise gigs, and lead the City University Experimental Ensemble.

My friend made https://amtrack.live/ and it's neat!

If you take Amtrak and want info on train status/delays, it's annoying that the official Amtrak website is slow to load & doesn't have train status perma-URLs to bookmark/share. https://railrat.net/ is pretty good but has ads. amtrack.live is faster & has no ads.

Hey Internet Queerdos and Allies,

It's the first day of Pride month, which means there's only 29 days of corporate rainbow washing left to go!

Before we get started, here's a content warning (#CW) for some swearing, dark topics, and a lot of If that's alright with you, then let's goooo!

Okay, so it's been an interesting past year. The Cass report came out and helped roll back trans rights in some pretty serious ways, the conservative Right kept right on proving to be downright 💩 humans, there's at least one genocide threatening people's right to exist, and billionaires continued to exercise their (money-given) right to make everything worse for everyone but them. Rights have been a big topic lately.

Oh, and I almost threw myself off a bridge several months back—but we'll get to that in a moment.

Fuck. I need some rainbow-safe brain-bleach before we continue, so here are some good things that happened:

I traded in my old gender for a shiny new one (technically I just binned the old one—it was pretty outdated). Speaking of dating, I started seeing a lovely enby (hi @catsalad!) from the infosec community. All the people I do safety checks with are still here, and Trump became an official felon 🎉

Alright, that's a bit better. Now on to the actual point of this article: acceptance, community, and safety.

Those three things are right up there with staying hydrated and memes when I think about what any queer person needs to thrive.

Acceptance is a prerequisite for community. Our diversity of experience is just as important as our shared experience. Without being accepting of what makes us each unique and wonderful, our communities are fragile and prone to fracturing. You only have to look at those who try to define what a "real man" or "real woman" is to see how they draw circles around their in-group that get smaller and smaller until no one fits.

Community breeds safety. You may snap a twig with your bare hands, but bind 'em together and you'll find a fagot much harder. Members of our community support each other—and that support becomes so much more important when our queer friends and family run up against the bigotry and horrors of this world. But we're not just one community; we're an alphabet soup of people who come together under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. Regardless of the specifics, we're the ones who weren't born with the default settings...and that's beautiful—that's worth protecting.

So what about the bridge? Well, like so many people who identify as LGBTQ+, I had a lot of trauma growing up. Trauma that I continue to collect and box up like newly caught Pokémon. There are a lot of sources of that trauma for me: tech-industry layoffs, an abusive partner, neuro-divergence, as well as non-conforming gender and sexuality in a world whose motto might as well be "Of the Default, by the Default, and for the Default".

This all came together one day after a fight with my spouse that left me in a very dark place. I didn't feel safe, I didn't feel like I really belonged to any community, and I didn't feel accepted by those closest to me.

As I stood on the bridge, I got a notification on my phone...then another. It was enough to snap me out of it for a second, and I checked my messages through the tears. Thinking back I honestly don't remember who they were from or what they said, but I do remember that they were from Mastodon, from a couple people who just happened to reach out at the exact right moment. I'll skip the rest of the details, because some of you have already heard this story and they're not really important to this article.

The important part is that I made it home in one piece because someone reached out. Someone who didn't even know how much I needed them to.

That little tie to the queer community was all it took to ground me in the moment and save my life.

Since then I've been keeping an eye out for others that might need grounding and doing my best to make sure they feel accepted. I've been welcoming as many new people into the community as I can, and I've been trying my best to be a safe space for anyone who needs it.

So, wrapping this up, I want to ask you to do the same. Not just today, but every day—as often as you can. Sometimes all it takes is showing a little kindness and compassion to make a big difference in someone's life.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go check in on some people and tell them how glad I am that they're here.

—Alice Watson 💜

#Pride #Pride2024 #LGBTQ #Community #Acceptance #Safety #Trans #MentalHealth #Outreach #Activism #Love #Welcome

🎆 10 Years Of Antifa International!!!!!!!!!!🎂

From two antifa dorks with a Tumblr blog to a collective of 10 people in 8 countries on 9 different social media platforms with over 110K followers, we like to think that we've punched above our weight (sometimes literally) in the global anti-fascist movement.

Judge for yourselves:
https://antifainternational.tumblr.com/post/752089141620113408/10-years-of-antifa-international

#antifa, #antifascism, #antifascist, #antifascisti, #antifascismo, #10years

🫶 A JEDI Knight cares about:

#Justice
#Equity
#Diversity
#Inclusion

je ne sais quoi levels are holding at 73%

(73%) ■■■■■■■□□□

As we enter #PrideMonth, this is a reminder that the A in #LGBTQIA+ does NOT stand for Ally. It stands for #Asexual, #Aromantic, and #Agender. Don't leave them out of Pride Month.

Just watched a pair of northern orioles trying to drive a huge crow away from their nest, and at a certain point a red-winged blackbird showed up and went for the crow, because blackbirds are basically just “Not even my nest, but I will FIGHT you, motherfucker, any time, any place.” A red-winged blackbird will take on anything smaller than a Cessna, just on principle.

And frankly, I think that's the kind of energy we could all use right now.

#birds

All of this "Democrats should worry about tit for tat" is beyond hypocritical. Democrats did not do tit-for-tat against GWB after the ginned up Clinton Impeachment. Democrats didn't do it to Trump after GOP tried the same thing with Obama nor when they refused to support legislation they normally would under Obama. Trump already tried to make the US AG and DOJ his personal law firm. He directly interfered with investigations against cronies and his family. Meanwhile Democratic congressional members and the Biden's own son are under active investigation and criminal cases for stuff that was shady as fuck, in the case of Menedez, or wouldn't normally have gone this far in the case of some of Hunter's charges. Republicans were already going to use these things without the pretense they are presenting here because one of their own was finally held to account. #uspoli #rant