So within two days of each other, Fox News writes an article comparing aromanticism and asexuality to pedophilia, and then Matt Walsh releases a video saying asexuality is a mental illness and asexuals are tricking teenagers into having depression.
Not sure what’s going on right now over in Conservative World, but it’s a hell of wild U-turn for them to suddenly switch from “Oh no! The left is sexualizing our children!” to “Oh no! The left is asexualizing our children!”
It’s a reminder, I guess, that they’re coming for all of us. The fash and the white supremacists will not make nice distinctions between the queers when they put us up against the wall. There is no gatekeeping, no label-policing, no purity-purging and no assimilation that any of us can do that will save us. They want us dead, and while they’ll start with whoever is most vulnerable at any given time, they’ll get around to all of us eventually.
Queer solidarity means all of us because the fash are coming for all of us.
All Dividers are Feds. Stand united or die separately.
“If we do not hang together, we shall certainly all hang separately…”
This would help a lot of people, and it’s one of the reasons it’s so important to push back against the “but the parties are equally bad, so you shouldn’t bother voting” type rhetoric.
jesus christ this would be huge.
hi! if you see this and think it’s a good idea: PLEASE leave a comment. it’s super easy & you can do this in <5 minutes:
When a government agency proposes a rule change like this, they legally must have a public comment period before finalizing it. AND they have to read and respond to those comments in the final draft of the regulation. Not enough people are aware of this , but it can really have an impact!!
This link will take you to the Federal Register page for the proposed rule, where you click the big green button to Submit a Formal Comment
Your comment can be as long or short as you’d like- it can just be one sentence! The key is to clearly STATE YOUR SUPPORT for the proposed rule. You can also look at other existing comments for support.
If you have personal experience with disability benefits, especially the reduction of benefits from free meals/groceries, those are great to include. They like to hear from people personally impacted by these changes, or know people who are.
I know it can be intimidating to post a public comment like this but it is SO IMPORTANT to engage with specific policy changes like this. Saying “this is great!” on social media doesn’t help governmental officials understand the level of support a change like this has, or how much good it would do.
I support this and left a comment. Having a good diet and being able to wash yourself and your clothes are all priorities when you’re trying to find work. People are not poor by choice. They are poor by circumstance. Being poor is not a reflection on anyone’s moral, social, or mental capabilities. It happens. They need to be supported, helped, and cared for.
Please re-blog to widen the data sample! I might use this for my statistics project at the end of the semester, and every answer is a great help :).
Please share in the tags what you picked and why if you’re so inclined.
The subways and buses are terrific close to on in Manhattan. But they’re bad in the outermost parts of Brooklyn, not a lot better than that in Queens, and don’t even TALK to me about Staten Island or the Bronx.
this probably hasn’t made the news in other countries - huge mining company Rio Tinto managed to lose this little capsule (8 x 6 mm) somewhere in West Australia:
it’s caesium-137, the stuff that has made Chernobyl uninhabitable, and you don’t want to be standing within 5-10 meters of it, because it’s blasting out beta and gamma rays. you REALLY don’t want to pick it up, because it’ll give you radiation burns.
what’s nuts is it seems to have somehow escaped from its “secure” container and fallen out of a bolt hole while being transported, and then nobody noticed for TWO WEEKS.
anyway there are fire fighters on their sixth day of scouring 1,400 km (!) of desert road right now, but it’s so small that it may never be found (I think the detection radius with the equipment they’re using is maybe 20m). it’s so small that it could have stuck in a car’s tire treads, or been picked up by an unfortunate bird or other wildlife. it has a half-life of 30 years, which means it’ll be dangerously radioactive for centuries.
@dsudis just tipped me off that someone has copied Soldier’s Heart and published it through Kindle Unlimited. It’s been up there since December 8 of this year.
(There are a zillion books on Amazon called Soldier’s Heart, but this one is definitely mine–if you click through to the preview, it is literally just a cut-and-paste.)
Does anyone know what you’re supposed to do, when something like that happens?
I mean, this idiot didn’t even change the names, so I suppose Julian Fellowes/whoever owns the rights to Downton Abbey also has grounds to object to this.
Ah, I am wondering if this is the same person I just responded to via ask? If not we may have a bigger plagiarism issue at hand (again—it happens every few years.)
Best thing to do is report to Amazon (and any other hosting sites) immediately. Ao3 might also want to be made aware of it just for added legal clout.
Also, if you see or recognize any other authors, let them know so they can also report them and if necessary take legal action.
Otherwise name and shame. Find their socials and light them up. We do not take kindly to plagiarists profiting from fandom.
At least 2 of that “(Combat Series)” are straight copy pasted fics. The rest of them probably are too.
There’s over 500 books, most of them appear to be stolen. I retweeted the thread here.
The good news, after having looked at their catalog is that Plush Books published them all under Kindle Unlimited, which requires exclusivity. The mere fact that these works exist elsewhere online puts them in direct violation of KU terms and Amazon comes down on that hard.
It just requires a lot of reporting. Hopefully Amazon will see an influx of reports and axe the whole account.
Hey hey!
My friend Kokom, who uncovered the Romilly King plagiarism, started posted about this on Twitter yesterday. Kokom, @nickelkeep, and I made a server then (about Romilly) to try to track down plagiarism victims, and it’s been running full steam since yesterday tracking down affected authors and contacting them. I suspect indirectly that’s how you, op, ended up being pinged.
Kokom put together a template authors can use:
Hi,
I affirm under penalty of perjury that I am the author of the work posted at [FIC LINK] as a free-to-read story. Under statute 17 USC 512, Amazon has a legal obligation to take down [Author]’s [Book name] in response to a valid DMCA takedown notice by the author. According to this statute, if [Book] is not taken down, you are making Amazon liable to be sued. Please check with a manager to verify.
I don’t need to fill in my contact info just because Amazon wants it, and I don’t have to provide my home number and address to make my claim valid. I’ve written in the author’s note section of my fic that I haven’t given [Author] permission to use my work, which is proof enough that [Author] has stolen the work from someone, but if you’d like more proof, I can also email you screenshots of comments/kudos I’ve received from my readers from [year] and on that are still in my inbox.
Please take [Book] down.
/template
I hope this helps.
Also note that as far as we know currently Plush Books published all “their” (stolen, plagiarized) works on Barnes and Noble, too, so you’ll want to do take down notices in both places.
I’m usually the one who xposts Kokom’s discoveries to Tumblr (because they don’t use tumblr, they’re on Twitter) but I’m traveling so haven’t been able to, so apologies that my fucked up December schedule means there’s not more information on tumblr atm.
And if you check their account you’ll see a lot of other information about the efforts they’ve spearheaded since they made their discovery of this plagiarism public. There are dozens kf effected fandoms, it’s insane how fucking lazy and shameless this/these assholes are.
More info Kokom posted on Discord after I said “help look at this tumblr post how should I answer it”
Step by step advice:
1. Go to: <https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/submit-dmca-notice/> and have a read.
2. Edit your fic A/N to reflect that you are not profiting from the work and it is not published anywhere other than (site).
3. If the copyright page has mentions FicLab, contact FicLabApp on Twitter or <https://www.ficlab.com/contact> to help block the person who downloaded it.
4. Send the text with “I affirm that…” to ec2-abuse@amazon.com or abuse@amazonaws.com
5. Email OTW about it, but they are already in the know about this and an influx of emails may make it harder for them to investigate.
6. If you spot copyrighted art, such as the SHIELD logo, Mandalorian helmet, or anything else, email the pictures and links to the copyright holder. If you recognize a small artist, contact the artist and have them file a DMCA request.
(Yes, Plush literally used Disney’s trademarked SHIELD logo on a book. Whoever did this is also an idiot)
Fandoms spotted from covers alone: Doctor Who, lots of Star Trek, Predator, lots of Pacific Rim, Twilight (or similar), Sherlock, Stargate, Marvel, especially stucky, Star Wars, Witcher, Alien, Transformers, Hannibal, James Bond, Pokemon, lots of zombies.
Basically if you write sci-fi in particular, you might want to go see if your stuff has been stolen.
They literally made a 15 year old cry and called her a Satanist.
Excuse me. A bipolar Satanist.
oh my god this is the mural. the same people who whine about how getting fired for saying slurs is censorship think that a 15 year old drawing rainbows must be stopped by any means necessary. quick everyone, we need to verbally abuse and publicly humiliate children! to protect the children!
Conservatives have basically only just caught up with the fact that almost all kids and teens have always been into media full of witches and ghosts and monsters and it’s all the sudden their new freakout, Satanic Panic is back for real and this time it knows what anime is.
This is how they were when I was a kid and it was even taken seriously by politicians and mainstream media so enjoy the coming decades or two of the most random possible cartoon shows and games setting off massive new witch hunts.
This is horrifying. Those “parents” bullying and humiliating a young woman over her ART!
