Anonymous asked: could you please explain how the safeword traffic system works?? i really cant wrap my head around it

sleepwithgiggli:

drkdreams:

femsubdenial:

Sure.

Red means stop. No more negotiation, something has crossed a line (too painful, something bad that wasn’t negotiated, etc.)

Yellow means that you need a break or that something is too much, or that if the top continues then you’re going to “red” soon.

Green means that things are going well and you want to continue if not ramp it up a little.

While a bottom might blurt out red or yellow, I’ve never seen a bottom volunteer “green”. It’s usually said in answer to when a top is checking in to make sure everything is okay. Asking “How are you?” and getting an answer of “fine” or “okay” might mean the bottom is just on autopilot and reflexively answering. Asking “What’s your color?” and getting “green” or “I was very close to yellow when you stopped” is much better.

One of my favorite doms to watch at parties was doing a pre-scene negotiation with someone he hadn’t played with before and said something like “Now, just between you and me here ;-) , my favorite color is yellow. It’s not about taking anything I can dish out. I promise you, I can always go harder. I want to know how you’re doing. I’ll likely yellow you, on purpose, a few times, just to find out where your limits are and then aim for a little below that. I don’t want to hear ‘green green green, green green red’ because then the scene’s over. I want some indication of how you’re doing and when you’re getting close to what you can handle, okay?”

And then, whenever she yellowed, he praised her. And why wouldn’t he?? She gave him vital information that allowed the both of them to have more fun!

Recently I have heard some discussions on also adding BLUE to this system for medical issues. It would function like RED but also in one word alert your partner you are having a medical issue, e.g. asthma attack, body cramps, low blood sugar, dizziness or some other sysmtom that is a problem for you. If you have already discussed medical issue with you partner, which you should do, blue might key them into something they can respond to with that knowledge to help rather than red and having to explain further.

Example: if I have asthma and communicate with my partner that it’s been bothing me recently and here is where my inhaler will be during a scene and I start having breathing issues and can’t stop coughing or catch my breathe to make out long or multiple words, I can say blue and they would know to get my inhaler. Or they would know to ask medical related questions in relation to stopping rather than thinking they pushed too hard.

I hadnt heard of the BLUE addition, but that’s great. Thanks for spreading the word about it.

Oh the BLUE addition is very useful! I’m prone to fainting and this will be in me arsenal, thank you!

Anonymous asked:

hey, how do you cope with people saying we only have a small amount of time left to stop the worst effects of climate change? no matter how hopeful and ok i am, that always sends me back into a spiral :(

reasonsforhope:

A few different ways

1. The biggest one is that I do math. Because renewable energy is growing exponentially

Up until basically 2021 to now, all of the climate change models were based on the idea that our ability to handle climate change will grow linearly. But that’s wrong: it’s growing exponentially, most of all in the green energy sector. And we’re finally starting to see proof of this - and that it’s going to keep going.

And many types of climate change mitigation serve as multipliers for other types. Like building a big combo in a video game.

Change has been rapidly accelerating and I genuinely believe that it’s going to happen much faster than anyone is currently predicting

2. A lot of the most exciting and groundbreaking things happening around climate change are happening in developing nations, so they’re not on most people’s radars.

But they will expand, as developing nations are widely undergoing a massive boom in infrastructure, development, and quality of life - and as they collaborate and communicate with each other in doing so

3. Every country, state, city, province, town, nonprofit, community, and movement is basically its own test case

We’re going to figure out the best ways to handle things in a remarkably quick amount of time, because everyone is trying out solutions at once. Instead of doing 100 different studies on solutions in order, we get try out 100 (more like 10,000) different versions of different solutions simultaneously, and then figure out which ones worked best and why. The spread of solutions becomes infinitely faster, especially as more and more of the world gets access to the internet and other key infrastructure

4. There’s a very real chance that many of the impacts of climate change will be reversible

Yeah, you read that right.

Will it take a while? Yes. But we’re mostly talking a few decades to a few centuries, which is NOTHING in geological history terms.

We have more proof than ever of just how resilient nature is. Major rivers are being restored from dried up or dead to thriving ecosystems in under a decade. Life bounces back so fast when we let it.

I know there’s a lot of skepticism about carbon capture and carbon removal. That’s reasonable, some of those projects are definitely bs (mostly the ones run by gas companies, involving carbon credits, and/or trying to pump CO2 thousands of feet underground)

But there’s very real potential for carbon removal through restoring ecosystems and regenerative agriculture

The research into carbon removal has also just exploded in the past three years, so there are almost certainly more and better technologies to come

There’s also some promising developments in industrial carbon removal, especially this process of harvesting atmospheric CO2 and other air pollution to make baking soda and other industrially useful chemicals

adruze:

seymour-butz-stuff:

depsidase:

Oddly I don’t see a single occupation listed besides the last where they’ll murder you just because they’re having a bad day and automatically get away with it.

I have only love for the USPS.

(via spacelazarwolf)

xerxestexastoast:

dj-of-the-coven:

the-cassquatch:

Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.

Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?

Long collection of resources under the cut.

Keep reading

ALSO you should consider browsing Virtual Pet List and seeing if there are any pet sites you might be interested in playing. There is a whole genre of browser games right under your nose

(via an-aura-about-you)

sussexlavender:

largishcat:

Audrey R., who’s running for the OTW board, is apparently also currently running for office. As a Republican

so uhhhhhh keep that in mind when you’re voting

Oh heck no…

Their Q&A answers are just as concerning as suspected too.

Would you be in favor of creating a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee? Why or why not?

I see no reason creating another committee would help anything in light of the continued staffing issues, and see several ways it could hurt. Lumping nonwhite, and non-English-speaking, and non-American volunteers together in one committee is just tokenism with a bow on top. Those experiences are not singular or universal.
…

In what way is the experiences and issues faced by people of minority groups not singular and worth addressing? this just screams barely veiled racism. “It didn’t happen to me so therefor the issues other people face don’t exist.”

Additionally, she doesn’t seem to have much at all in the way of experience with OTW or work with the fandom community site as a whole. It kind of seems like they ran for the seat because they could.

Well, this is concerning.

katy-l-wood:

xkcd-for-that:

eaglefairy:

fallentechnate:

macleod:

daalseth:

surroundedbybooks:

womaninterrupted:

Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history

What happens when the world’s knowledge is held in a quasi-public square owned by a private company that could soon go out of business?

MIT Technology Review

Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.

This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.

Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.

So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.

That is not good.

In pseudo and acadamic circles this has routinely been called the ‘digital dark age’, I even wrote on the subject a few years ago but can’t find that article right now. [There is even a Wikipedia article on the concept] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age#:~:text=The%20digital%20dark%20age%20is,technologies%20evolve%20and%20data%20decay).

It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.

This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.

@xkcd-for-that

Digital Resource Lifespan

xkcd

This is exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.

(via bloodlinemagick)

rthko:

I recently saw a post with Fran Lebowitz saying, “a book isn’t supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door,” and it made me think about the state of “representation” discourse online. I thought back to an anon I once received from someone who claims to get “secondhand embarrassment” from “drag queens, leather daddies, and kinksters with pup hoods acting like they represent all gays.” Many thought my response was too harsh, that I ought to show more sympathy to people who do not “relate” to nor feel “represented” by these modes of queer being. Blame it on online fandom, blame it on heteronormativity, but we are too concerned with “relatability.” It is the sort of “relatability” advertising executives concern themselves with, or “relatability” of people who treat their online presence as a “brand.” It is a notion I find alien to queer art and culture.

I have never done drag, nor do I consider myself a part of the leather community beyond befriending others who do and owning some gear. I do not “relate” to these expressions in any vulgar, literal sense, but they are still deeply resonant. And how many of these individuals truly “relate” to the images they peform? Drag artists and leathefolk are purveyors of fantasy. In their daily lives, they might not be bikers, rockstars, pop divas, or mythical beasts, but they reinvent themselves through metaphors and performances. These theatrical performances are no less absurd than the quotidian performances expected by cis straight society. Larry Mitchell writes, “The faggots act out their fantasies without believing them to be real. The men act out their fantasies always proclaiming that they are real.“

This could explain why literal attempts at relatability are often less resonant than campy extravogant fantasies. I once wrote a rant about how Taylor Swift is not a gay icon, and an anon smugly told me, "Taylor makes music for everyone and not just gays.” Yes, I suppose she does make music for “everyone,” in the same way that the Midwestern weather reporter voice is the universal accent of the English speaking world. But diva worship was never about “relating;” rather, it’s about survival through the evocation of patron saints of strength and glamor. Most celebrity or mass media attempts at “relatability” are at best clueless or at worst insulting. I would much rather participate in a campy fantasy, which is in its own right more “real.” Susan Sontag describes camp as the “farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”

I am not telling anyone to stop pushing for the recognition of diverse stories. This is crucial! But the recognition of queer stories should also come with an understanding of queer modes of resonance. When has John Waters ever produced something "relatable?” Who cares? His work resonates, in fact, more than a lot of “safe” gay media that should be all accounts be more “relatable.” The “average” listener would not necessarily relate to SOPHIE. They may find her work otherwordly or downright unsettling. But she did not produce music for the “average” listener, at least not before the rest of the musical landscape dragged to catch up with her. Adam Zmith writes: “Inside SOPHIE’s words, performances and final act is the queer utopia of always grasping, always dreaming of a freer life.” We are living the wildest dreams of our former, closeted selves, but we are still always grasping, never quite satiated. Queer art is not just autobiographical but aspirational. Let art be a door.

(via starlightomatic)

rapidreptile:

rapidreptile:

it should be illegal for landlords to charge for in building laundry

it should be illegal for landlords

Hard agree. Or at least, illegal for it to be so much more expensive than in unit laundry.

(via spacelazarwolf)

spockhatesterfs:

sarugetyou:

Hello white mutuals. Before you is a charcuterie board with 15 different types of cheese. If you manage to go 12 hours without touching the cheeses you can leave this room. Good luck.

I was eating off this cool cheese plate while you were talking can you repeat that pls

Easy for me, I’m lactose intolerant and abhor cheese. When I was a kid, I used to pull the melted cheese off my pizza just to eat the bread and sauce.

(via animentality)

greyface-dog asked:

A while ago while I was in tumblr jail, you posted that you had a masters in science fiction literature (unless you didn't, I have been known to be mistaken), and I am wondering, what do you consider 'important' works of science fiction? Like the science fiction literary canon? I am so curious. Feel free to ignore, I will not harass you.

quasi-normalcy:

Yes! I do. I can tell you the ones that I was assigned (I’m afraid that the list skews extremely male and (especially) white).

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
• Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) [You can probably add Odd John (1935) to this list]
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) [You can probably add From the Earth to the Moon (1865)]
• H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1897) [Though you can probably go ahead and add The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The First Men in the Moon (1901)]
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)
• Catherine Burdekin (writing as Murray Constantine), Swastika Night (1937)
• Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920)
• Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950) [You can probably add the first three Foundation novels here as well]
• Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1921)
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
• Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1967) and Rendezvous with Rama (1973) [Add: Childhood’s End (1953) and The Fountains of Paradise (1979)
• John Wyndham, Day of the Triffids (1951) [add: The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)]
• H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) [add The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931)]
• Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954)
• Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1956)
• Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers (1959) [Probably Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) too, depending on, you know, how much of Heinlein’s bullshit you can take]
• J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962) [Also, The Burning World (1964) and The Crystal World (1966)]
• Phillip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962) [Also Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and several of his short stories]
• Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
• Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man (1969)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-5 (1969)
• Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974) [Also The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)]
• Brian Aldiss, Supertoys series
• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
• Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992) [Also Green Mars and Blue Mars]
• They also included Iain M. Banks’s The Algebraist (2004), but I personally think you’d be better off reading some of his Culture novels

Other ones that I might add (not necessarily my favourite, just what I would consider the most influential):

• Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1974)
• Matsamune Shiro, Ghost in the Shell (1989-91)
• Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira (1982-1990)
• Octavia Butler, Lilith’s Brood (1987-89) and Parable of the Sower (1993)
• Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos (1971)
• Hector Garman Oesterheld & Francisco Solano Lopez, The Eternaut (1957-59)
• Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem (2008)
• Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975)
• William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland (1908)
• Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)
• Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)
• Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (1985) [Please take this one from a library]
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1912)
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003)
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
• Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy (1952-68)
• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
• Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
• Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
• Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

I completely agree about the Culture series over over the Algebraist!

Oryx and Crake was a bit mind blowing to me, the Left Hand of Darkness completely blew my mind. It was phenomenal IMO