starless @starless@pixie.town

Finally for Ace Week, if I'm allowed to self-promo a bit, I'm an asexual author who has published two books with asexual protagonists and ace romance.

Trying to write the kind of books I've always wanted to read!

BOOKS & BONE is a haunted but oddly sweet story of librarians and necromancy.

https://victoriacorva.xyz/books/books-and-bone-by-Victoria-Corva/

NON-PLAYER CHARACTER is a cosy queer portal fantasy where a group of TTRPG nerds in their 30s must navigate the world of their game.

https://victoriacorva.xyz/books/non-player-character-by-victoria-corva/

The average male human weighs 198lb

The average vampire bat weighs 0.03kg

The average vampire must there for turn into about 3000 bats when escaping awkward social situations 🧛🏻‍♀️ 🦇 🦇 🦇

take the red pill (original meaning) (HRT)

Why is it called induction when you of in the duction of out recur the duction

Come hang out with actual clowns as they take a break from reality to spend the night encouraging levity (and defying gravity) in the #CircusInPlace video chat!

The fun starts at 8pm UTC-5:

https://meet.jit.si/circushomegym

#acrobatics
#clown
#circus

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903.152.0_1.pdf

"Ok so, I just read through all 173 pages of the unredacted Google antitrust filing and I have to say that either Google is screwed or society is screwed, we'll find out which.

Unordered list of fun things I learned:

- google has a secret deal with facebook called "Jedi Blue" that they knew was so illegal that it has a whole section describing how they'll cover for each other if anyone finds out

- google appears to have a team called gTrade that is wholly dedicated to ad market manipulation

- Google is willing to do almost everything to prevent people from circumventing their ad exchanges
- This is what AMP is about

- Google habitually insider trades on their ad exchanges in every way you can think of and every way you can't.

- Google has worked with Facebook and Microsoft to discourage them from increasing user privacy, lamenting occasions where they prioritized their reputation over their collective business interest

- Google had a plan called "Project NERA" to turn the web into a walled garden they called "Not Owned But Operated". A core component of this was the forced logins to the chrome browser you've probably experienced (surprise!)
"

from: https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1452053938195341314

court docs:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903.152.0_1.pdf

Friend received a corporate-branded copy of the game Monopoly from their workplace as a thank you. I can appreciate the thought, but there's something extra dystopian about a multimillion-dollar company sending its employees a branded version of a game whose theme is "it is impossible to ethically succeed at capitalism"

In things I didn’t expect to learn today: apparently gender markers on passports are a result of people in the 60s and 70s fucking with gender norms and presentation so much, that the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) requested that a gender marker was added to passports because:

the rise in the early 1970s of unisex attire and hairstyles, photographs had become a less reliable means for ascertaining a traveler’s sex.

Also, “fun” tidbit: there is no trace left in the archives of why they needed to know the sex of people in the first place…

(other “fun” fact: you can thank Napoléon Bonaparte for the gender marker on birth certificates apparently :/)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-rise-of-androgyny-changed-our-passports

No other user
edited between any
two of these edits

"Trailblazing trans woman becomes first in Uganda to get ID with correct gender"

“'I want to spend the next 35 years of my life shedding the sad African trans narrative. We don’t just carry tragic stories,' she said, 'I am a molecular biologist, geneticist, activist, imaginative, daring, different, audacious and an Aries.'"

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/10/22/trans-uganda-id-gender-cleopatra-kambugu/

big in the UK rn:

🔁 @TransActualUK: Today and everyday we celebrate #TransLives. If you’re trans, tell us something about you. If you’re cis, tell us what you do to support trans people.

“We are all worthy of safety and protection everywhere…And we are worthy of life. We are worthy of love.” Indya Moore

#TransLives 🐘

made a little bike trip to the lake today 💗🍂

wasted an evening figuring out why trees were rendering too big in this game; turns out they were using log scaling

69% of New Zealand is fully vaccinated.

NICE.

Extremely timely in light of the immediate defence reaction on the fediverse of the new fascism social networks:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3479525

Science shows deplatforming works

Keep deplatforming

Dear Internet, I'm helping an old man who's almost blind. His computer is really important to him, but he's losing what's left of his sight rapidly. He uses Windows on a normal PC. Can anyone recommend tools/settings/software I can help him try? #a11y #toot

my boss: *about to cry in the zoom meeting* I'm just so grateful for this team...
me: *didn't hear what she said, I'm studying this image on my phone*