Havering Council says there is no reason for anyone to be homeless at Christmas after just two rough sleepers found in latest count

One I ran across on Twitter, and clicked through out of curiosity since that just didn’t sound right.

How did they get that number in the headline?

Thirty eight volunteers targeted hotspots around the borough such as the town centre, railway stations and the local hospital on Thursday night (December 29) and encountered just two rough sleepers…

“However, this was just one night and the council know of at least 12 people sleeping rough.“

I can well imagine that not everyone in that situation would want to deal with the council, or these volunteers going around getting nosy. I doubt I would gladly talk to them. Twelve still sounds very low for the whole borough, and I have personally repeatedly seen more than two street homeless people hanging around just Romford Station most nights. Doesn’t sound like they were even looking that hard.

Also from the same person quoted there, Councillor Joshua Chapman, cabinet member for housing:

“It’s also important to note that not everyone chooses to accept the help or accommodation offered by the council.

“We have actively sought out rough sleepers to make them aware that help is available but unfortunately in some instances they have turned down offers of support.”

I was trying to find an old post discussing exactly that in more detail. But, if people would rather sleep on the street (in this climate, no less) than make use of whatever help/support you’re offering? Maybe you should listen to what will actually serve their needs, instead of getting snotty about it.

See also: The majority of homeless people in London are foreign nationals (Most of those are Eastern European, followed by people from elsewhere in the EU)

Homelessness charity helped deport rough sleepers

EU rough sleepers win damages for illegal deportations

They’ve supposedly had to stop doing that to EU-connected immigrants, but would I trust the local council or charity groups given the political climate these days? Hmm.

Anyway, I wasn’t that surprised at the overall slant of the piece, because politics.

What did surprise me some, though?

Investigation work carried out by the Recorder revealed that at least three homeless people have died in the borough in the last year, however no records of their deaths have been kept, and data released by charity Shelter shows that an additional 490 people are now homeless in Havering since the November 2017 figure of 1,956.

Of the 2,446 currently homeless, research shows 22 are rough sleepers and the remaining 2,424 are living in temporary accommodation.

This means one in 105 people are now homeless in Havering, up from one in 129 last year.

(So, now we’re up to 22 official rough sleepers instead of 12? 🤔)

Again, I would be surprised if that weren’t a low estimate. Those figures do include people living in temporary accommodations, couch surfing, etc. But still, somewhere around 1% of people living in this borough are now homeless.

(And this still isn’t as high as some others. One neighboring borough was in the top 10 as of last year, and I really doubt this has improved any more than it has here.)

I knew the situation had been getting worse for any number of reasons, but I didn’t realize just how high the rates had gotten. Or how sharply they’d increased within just a year. And this is before whatever else happens with the ongoing Brexit shitshow.

Havering Council says there is no reason for anyone to be homeless at Christmas after just two rough sleepers found in latest count

geekandmisandry:

bogleech:

ikea-the-metalsmith:

the-last-hair-bender:

thedevilsofficialblog:

island-delver-go:

oppa-homeless-style:

actuallyjuststealingmemes:

water-based-introspection:

just-shower-thoughts:

It was kind of a dick move to create animals that require air, then confine them to the freaking ocean

If you are talking about dolphins they used to be wolf like creatures that due to scarcity of food they had to hunt in water so they slowly evolved into water mammals, dolphins still have claw bones but they are unnecessary and dolphins will get rid of them with time and will develop abilities to breath under water

(This also partially applies to whales)

They were what now?

Mother Nature, come out here I just want to talk

Whales are actually Ungulates, more so hippos, entelodons, etc…

Meaning they were somewhat related to big celebrities such as Daedon (the “hell pig”) and Andrewsarchus.

The appearence of the first ancestors of whales probably looked like a small hoofed thing called Indohyus.

(Illustration by julio lacerda)

(illustration by Tiffany Turill)

Basically they went from tiny hoofed herbivore to bigger hoofed carnivore to crocodile-like thing to seal-like things to big sea predators.

It’s important to mention that we now know dolphins will probably never need to develop true water breathing, because the fact that they breathe air from the surface is actually an ADVANTAGE for them. They get more oxygen at once than an animal with gills and it permits a much higher, more energized activity level for longer periods of time.

They are murderous monsters empowered by their access to the forbidden air

Ok, science is cancelled.

Yes, Virginia, Tumblr is important for all those other reasons and also…

aprillikesthings:

fierceawakening:

tinkdw:

dimples-of-discontent:

impostoradult:

There is a particular take on the destruction of Tumblr that I keep waiting for someone to write, but no one has yet. Which means I apparently need to do it myself.

The take is, essentially, that not only should adults have access to adult content – in itself, valid and true – but also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual. (Not all spaces; I still think it should be illegal to have sex on the sidewalk. But SOME spaces that enable the sexual and the non-sexual to exist side-by-side)

Part of what I think leads to the dehumanization of sex (and subsequently allows the stigma and shame to cling so heavily to it) is the complete bifurcation of life into SEX and EVERYTHING ELSE and never the twain shall meet. When we – at every turn – put all aspects of human life into one sphere, and sex into another, we dehumanize it. We remove the full subjectivity of people from it, which is a problem.

I think we need to actively cultivate spaces LIKE before-time!Tumblr where we can be people, and talk about what happened at work today, and the funny thing our dog did, and how our parents make us crazy during the holidays, and how dare they do X thing on Supernatural, and here’s a great version of that distracted boyfriend meme, and ALSO be able to talk about being horny on main, as the saying goes, and find the right porn clip to fap to. Or post nude selfies. Or hunt down that sweet, sweet NSFW Symbrock fanart.

Having spaces where the explicitly sexual and the non-sexual overlap is important to humanizing sex and, subsequently, de-stigmatizing it (which, it should go without saying, is particularly salient for marginalized people who often suffer way more heavily from sexual stigma)

This. As someone who is half French half British I’ve forever struggled with the frankly pretty Puritan British attitude towards sex and our bodies and the open French attitude. I know which is healthy and which isn’t from personal experience. People not discussing sex, nudity etc in a safe environment leads to so many issues around lack of education, understanding and future deep emotional and physical issues for young adults trying to figure life out. It can last our entire lives if not addressed.

My friends and I got naked in front of each other as teens to change like it’s no big deal and yeah on occasion we looked and compared bodies, it’s thanks to this that I know that my nipples which I hated for being so huge are actually not that weird. My friends all have completely different body shapes and it made me comfortable in mine knowing it was ok to not look like a model/porn star and be different because we all were.

I’ve learned so much from tumblr just from discussion and I share this with others, it’s embarrassing how little people know about their own bodies due to a lack of a forum to discuss it. This is such a good place for it and I’m so sad it is so niche already let alone if that now collapses.

Due to lack of discussion of sex and just human bodies someone close to me didn’t address the pain he had every time he had an erection until he confided in me as an open friend and it turned out he needed a medical circumcision. He went 10 YEARS with this pain (and not having sex) because he had no one to talk to about it and nowhere to look it up. Fucking ridiculous.

So yes, even for non trans / queer folk it’s so important to have an open forum somewhere regarding these things let alone how hugely important it is for these communities.

While at the same time I’m also angered that sex and nudity is villainised while nazism and it’s ilk is fiiiiiiine.

This . Is . Wrong .

“also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual.”

This.

One of my favorite things about rl kink communities? That we also went to munches (get togethers at restaurants) and just hung out, and sure we’d probably casually mention/joke about being huge perverts at some point because it was safe to do so among people we knew wouldn’t be offended, but the nice thing was just being able to be around people and talk about anything.

God, yeah. I remember being wigged out at first when I got on tumblr and it was just this free-wheeling place where someone would complain about their bad day and their next post would be a reblog of pornographic fan art with graphic comments in the tags.

You can follow people who make nsfw content (photos, fic, art) and get to know them as people. You can follow people that aren’t content creators and get to know their tastes in kinky shit. You can have friends you met because you liked the same kind of porn and find out all the other stuff you have in common and become real friends.

I don’t talk about my sex life on fucking facebook (other than in very locked groups, lol). Hell, I’m not sure I’ll do it on twitter unless I start a separate one for that (which….tbh I might; I liked having a sideblog here for me to post nudes and sexual tmi).

I’m really gonna miss the way that stuff was all mixed together here.

ratherberaidingkick3:

ironxteachergirl:

theycallme-misssunshine:

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

fyrasha:

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

My mom cried as a first year teacher when she realized many of her students were food insecure. She put a snack pantry in her class and has had one ever since.

My sister cried with anger as a first year teacher because of how few of her students grew up without being exposed to violence, poverty, and neglect.

My dad didn’t cry as a first year teacher, but was convinced he was the worst teacher ever for 4 years straight. (He wasn’t)

My aunt was exhausted for the first year because her students were convinced she’d only be at their school for one year and then move to a better paying school district like all of their other new teachers. She spent the entire time teaching, actively gaining trust, and calming anxieties.

Some of these things are not technically school related, but have an impact on students in the classroom. As new teachers, my relatives got varying levels of support. New teachers need better support.

3 quit at my old job because they didn’t feel like they were getting the pay or support that was appropriate for what they were doing in the classroom. All of the teachers I have encountered pay for many of their own supplies. Many take time before or after school to check up on students they feel are at risk.

There are teachers that have students live with them or end up fostering students. My mom fostered 2 students and had another 2 live with us.

What many teachers do on the job isn’t as supported as it could be. They aren’t paid like they should.

Did I mention that a lot of the first year teachers I have worked with qualify for SNAP benefits and/or WIC? 😦

This post has 2k notes.

Re: Why Teachers Provide Snacks (at my work)

ALL of the teachers I work with at my school provide snacks to students.

We’re a Title I school. This means almost all of our students are food insecure. It’s unreasonable to expect food insecure families to provide their own snacks to school.

ALL of the teachers and many of our other staff members provide snacks for their classrooms or offices. Our counselor has snacks in her office. Our health room assistant has snacks in her office. Our principal has snacks in his office. Our vice principal has snacks in her office. The office professionals have small snacks available as well.

Our new teachers usually can’t afford to do this, so veteran teachers and support staff often chip in.

When students DON’T have access to snacks, they get tired. Our students can’t focus. Students get irritable. They’re feeling the effects of hunger and cannot focus on their work. We see escalated behaviors because kids are hungry.

Providing food not only prevents some problems from happening, but it’s The Right Thing To Do.

Many of our students’ Only Guaranteed Meals are at school. School meals are not designed to provide a child’s only source of nutrition. The caloric value of school lunches isn’t enough. So—Kids get snacks with lunch. Kids get multiple ‘breaks’ (which they think are ‘‘regular breaks’‘) for snacks.

Anyone who wants a small snack will get one.

We have a Friday Weekend Bag Program, but many families HATE THOSE. Those snack bags come from the Thurston County Food Bank. They only contain shelf stable food since many of our families don’t have a reliable way to cook things. Most of the families decline the bags because the Instant Noodles, Dry Granola Bars, and Vegetable Soup aren’t what they’d eat anyway.

__

A lot of the kids DO want fruit/vegetables. (Downside is if they can’t store those at home). We have some kids who try to hoard milk. <—a problem since many kids don’t have access to reliable refrigeration at home! Our milk ‘‘collecting’‘ kids ALL don’t have reliable refrigeration since they’re in living situations that don’t have refrigerators or freezers.

We provide snacks for the kids because we need to.

My Personal Project this coming school year is connecting My School with local nonprofit Fairshare Food Share Resource. It’s a group of volunteers who harvest small amounts of fruit and vegetables and give them away. They’re for smaller home gardeners who aren’t up for sending items directly to our food bank system due to time/health issues/etc.

The Thurston County Food Bank is expanding our school garden this year. I’m hoping that the garden will eventually be a nice Community You Pick for our students and the surrounding neighborhood.

The last big ol’ update had links. I’ll add links to this because food insecurity TICKS ME OFF. It shouldn’t be a thing. We’re fighting food insecurity at my elementary school.

All of my coworkers and all of my now-retired relatives have paid for classroom snacks/pantries With Their Own Money.

Food insecurity is a big issue in the United States.
When our kids aren’t eating enough they are tired, can’t focus, and are irritable. It’s difficult to get work done when you’re feeling the effects of hunger.

I’ll post excerpts of some articles below.

Feeding the need: Expanding school lunch programs

“Schools have always been the front line in the battle against
childhood hunger. It started with the National School Lunch Act, signed
by President Truman in 1946, which gave federal money to states to fund
school lunches.

Today more than 30 million kids benefit. And yet,
by some estimates at least one in six still doesn’t know where the next
meal is coming from.

“School
lunch is no longer this Brady Bunch convenience; it is a soup kitchen,”
said Jennifer Ramo, of the New Mexico anti-poverty group Appleseed.

“It
is a place where kids who haven’t eaten at night or haven’t eaten that
weekend, go to get basic nutrition so they can function. I think
we just have no idea how big the problem is and how many children are
suffering. And the best thing to do is just must make sure they’re fed.”

Growing Hunger in Schools is a Growing Problem (2012)

“What do parents tell their kids on the first day of school – stay
out of trouble, do your homework, and listen to your teachers,” Nelson
said.

“That’s our message today: listen to your teachers. What are they
telling us? Hunger needs to be a national priority.”

One in five children struggle with hunger nationwide and six out of
ten teachers report students regularly coming to school hungry. According to 80 percent of those teachers, the problem is only getting worse.

Educators realize the toll hunger takes on students. Nine in ten
teachers consider breakfast to be “extremely important” to academic
achievement. Fifty-three percent of teachers spend an average $26 of
their own money each month providing snacks for their students.”

Reading, writing and hunger: More than 13 million kids in this country go to school hungry

“There
is tremendous stigma of children going into a cafeteria before the
bell,” said McAuliffe, “whereas with the alternative breakfast model, it
normalizes it, creates community in the classroom around a meal, and
starts the day off strong.”

Underscoring the crucial impact a
healthy breakfast can have, a 2013 study done by Deloitte for No Kid
Hungry found that kids who have regular access to breakfast score 17.5
percent higher on standardized math tests

.Breakfast and lunch
programs in schools are making great strides in attacking childhood
hunger, but a huge gap remains. According to No Kid Hungry, a quarter of
all low-income parents worry their kids don’t have enough to eat
between school lunch and breakfast the next day; and three out of four
public school teachers say students regularly come to school hungry.

Increasingly, advocates are focusing on programs that ensure kids have
enough to eat when they are not in school, and after school and summer
meal programs are on the rise.”

Yep. My school is poor enough that it has all the kids on free breakfast and lunch, and nearly every teacher has a box of protein bars or fruit snacks or something to give to hungry kids in their classroom. We all buy them with our own money. How fucked are we as a society that this is pretty much normal at all the poorer schools?

A lot of our school funding is through property taxes. Low income areas have lower taxes which means lower funding for their neighborhood schools. It sucks.

Schools in high poverty areas are Title I schools. Almost every school in my district is Title I.

ALL public schools should be properly funded and NO ONE should be food insecure. (my 2 cents)

Further reading for anyone interested:

Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem

Is It Time to Stop Funding Schools With Local Property Taxes?

School Funding Inequality Makes Education ‘Separate And Unequal,’ Arne Duncan Says

Schools with greater than 40% of families considered low-income are qualified to apply funding to school-wide programming

Federal Title I Funding for Students who Struggle with Literacy

Title I: Rich School Districts Get Millions Meant for Poor Kids

Then there’s schools that are literally falling apart:

I work at one of America’s underfunded schools. It’s falling apart

It’s Not Just Freezing Classrooms in Baltimore. America’s Schools Are Physically Falling Apart

Detroit teachers fed up with shoddy school conditions

Leaking sewage, splintering walls: Parents complain Wake County school is falling apart

Without State Support, Michigan’s Schools Will Continue to Crumble

We’re dealing with students and families that are food insecure:

KIDS IN AMERICA ARE HUNGRY

Food for Thought: How Food Insecurity Affects a Child’s Education

Schools becoming the ‘last frontier’ for hungry kids

And guys, you know… It doesn’t have to be like this. Teachers like me who teach in other countries know this and are always so shocked when we read about and see what the US, supposedly a leading and not a developing country, is like in education

I always keep our extra snacks from our programs (usually the ones I did not eat or that other children did not open) just in case. I will never forget the four year old girl my third year in this program who would sneak food or her older siblings in third and fifth grade so they also had something to eat, since they gave so much of their portions to her and her little sister.

I straight up fed a few of my kids…

on fandom and content policing

elizabethminkel:

porcupine-girl:

quizzicalqueek:

fozmeadows:

So, listen.

While we’re all having a good laugh and/or panic at tumblr’s incompetent censorship implosion, I just want to take this opportunity to draw a parallel to a lot of the recent fandom wank about what content should or shouldn’t be allowed on AO3. Specifically: there’s a lot of people who want the Archive to ban particular types of fic, but who have no real understanding of how you would actually implement that in practice.

While there are legitimate arguments to be made about the unwisdom of tumblr’s soon-to-be-forbidden content choices – the whole “female-presenting nipples” thing and the apparent decision to prioritise banning tits over banning Nazis, for instance – the functional problem isn’t that they’ve decided to monitor specific types of content, but that they’ve got no sensible way of enacting their own policies. Quite clearly, you can’t entrust the process to bots: just today, I’ve seen flagged content that runs the gamut from Star Trek: TOS screenshots to paleo fish art to quilts to the entire chronic pain tag to a text post about a gay family member with AIDS – and at the same time, I’ve still been seeing porn gifs on my dash.

It’s absolute chaos, which is what happens when you try to outsource to programs the type of work that can only reliably be done by people – and even then, there’s still going to be bad or dubious or unpopular decisions made, because invariably, some things will need to be judged on a case by case basis, and people don’t always agree on where the needle should fall.

Now: consider that this is happening because tumblr is banning particular types of images. Images, at least, you can kiiiiinda moderate by bots, provided you’re using the bot-process as a filter to cut down on the amount of work done by actual humans, and also provided you’re willing to take a huge credibility hit given the poor initial accuracy of said bots, but: images. Bots can be sorta trained to recognise and sort those, right?

But the kind of AI sophistication you’d need to moderate all the content on a text-based site like AO3? That… yeah. That literally doesn’t exist, and going by tags and keywords wouldn’t help you either, because there’d be no handy way to distinguish what type of usage was present just on that basis alone. Posts about content generated by neural nets are hilarious precisely because our AI isn’t there yet, and based on what we’ve seen so far, we won’t be there for a good long while.

It’s a point I’ve made again and again, but I’m going to reiterate it here: it’s always easy to conjure up the most obvious, extreme and clear-cut examples of undesirable content when you’re discussing bans in theory, but in practice, you need to have a feasible means of enacting those rules with some degree of accuracy, speed and accountability that’s attainable within both budget and context, or else the whole thing becomes pointless.

On massive sites like AO3 and tumblr, the considerable expense of monitoring so much user-generated content with paid employees is, to a degree, obviated by the concept of tagging and blocking, the idea being that users can curate and control their own experience to avoid unpleasant material. There still needs to be oversight, of course – at absolute minimum, a code of conduct and a means of reporting those who violate it to a human authority in a position to enforce said code – but the thing is, given how much raw content accrues on social media and at what speed, you really need these policies to be in place, and actively enforced, from the get-go: otherwise, when you finally do start trying to moderate, you’ll have to wade through the entire site’s backlog while also trying to keep abreast of new content.

Facebook, which is a multi-billion dollar corporation, can afford to have paid human moderators in place for assessing content violations instead of relying on bots; however, it is also notoriously terrible at both following its own standards and setting them in the first place. To take an example salient to the tumblr mess, Facebook has an ongoing problem with how it handles breastfeeding posts, while its community standards regarding what counts as hate speech are, uhhh… Not Great. Twitter has similarly struggled with bot accounts proliferating during multiple recent elections and with the seemingly simple task of deplatforming Nazis – not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to take a quote-on-quote political stance, even for the sake of cleaning house.

It’s also because, quite frankly, neither Facebook nor Twitter were originally thought of as entities that would one day be ubiquitous and powerful enough to be used to sway elections; and when that capability was first realised by those with enough money and power to take advantage of it, there were no internal safeguards to stop it happening, and not nearly enough external comprehension of or appreciation for the risks among those in positions of authority to impose some in time to make a difference. Because even though time spent scrolling through social media passes like reverse dog years – which is to say, two hours can frequently feel like ten minutes – its impact is such that we fall into the trap of thinking that it’s been around forever, instead of being a really recent phenomenon. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, tumblr in 2007, AO3 in 2009, Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011, tinder in 2012, Discord in 2015. Even Livejournal, that precursor blog-and-fandom space, only began in 1999, with the purge of strikethrough happening in 2007. Long-term, we’re still running a global beta on How To Do Social Media Without Fucking Up, because this whole internet thing is still producing new iterations of old problems that we’ve never had to deal with in this medium before – or if so, then not on this scale, within whatever specific parameters apply to each site, in conjunction with whatever else is happening that’s relevant, with whatever tools or budget we have to hand. It is messy, and I really don’t see that changing anytime soon.

All of which is a way of saying that, while it’s far from impossible to moderate content on social media, you need to have actual humans doing it, a clear reporting process set up, a coherent set of rules, a willingness to enforce those rules consistently – or at least to explain the logic behind any changes or exceptions and then stand by them, too – and the humility to admit that, whatever you planned for your site to be at the outset, success will mean that it invariably grows beyond that mandate in potentially strange and unpredictable ways, which will in turn require active thought and anticipation on your part to successfully deal with.

Which is why, compared to what’s happening on other sites, the objections being raised about AO3 are so goddamn frustrating – because, right from the outset, it has had a clear set of rules: it’s just not one that various naysayers like. Content-wise, the whole idea of the tagging system, as stated in the user agreement, is that you enter at your own risk: you are meant to navigate your own experience using the tools the site has provided – tools it has constantly worked to upgrade as the site traffic has boomed exponentially – and there’s a reporting process in place for people who transgress otherwise. AO3 isn’t perfect – of course it isn’t – but it is coherent, which is exactly what tumblr, in enacting this weird nipple-purge, has failed to be.

Plus and also: the content on AO3 is fictional. As passionate as I am about the impact of stories on reality and vice versa, this is nonetheless a salient distinction to point out when discussing how to manage AO3 versus something like Twitter or tumblr. Different types of content require different types of moderation: the more variety in media formats and subject matter and the higher the level of complex, real-time, user-user interaction, the harder it is to manage – and, quite arguably, the more managing it requires in the first place. Whereas tumblr has reblogs, open inboxes and instant messaging, interactions on AO3 are limited to comments and that’s it: users can lock, moderate or throw their own comment threads open as they choose, and that, in turn, cuts down on how much active moderation is necessary.

tl;dr: moderating social media sites is actually a lot harder and more complicated than most people realise, and those lobbying for tighter content control in places like AO3 should look at how broad generalisations about what constitutes a Bad Post are backfiring now before claiming the whole thing is an easy fix.

Most of this rings true, but as a software dev with an (nonexpert) interest in AI, the idea that bots can recognise and categorise images easier than text is pretty much the opposite of anything I’ve ever read on the subject, unless things have changed drastically recently.

Sure, bots are shit at understanding text. They’re just shitter at understanding images.

Text: can probably work if ‘balls’ is nsfw from context, might struggle to work out erotica vs sex ed.

Images: *picture of round earring* is this a nipple??

The problem here is that people’s complaints about AO3 weren’t about “NSFW content.” If it were just “does it mention a dick?” that would be a much simpler problem.

They were saying AO3 should ban, say, portrayals of rape, or of underage sex – but many of those people will then agree that they’re only talking about certain portrayals of these things.

Can a bot figure out whether a story is portraying a rape in a positive or negative light? PEOPLE can’t even agree on that. Can a bot identify the exact ages of all participants in a sexual scene, even if those ages aren’t mentioned anywhere because anyone familiar with that particular canon would know them? Hell, can a bot even figure out if a sex scene is consensual?? Many humans can’t even fucking figure that out in real life. And then there are fics containing rape play, where people consent to have what looks like non-consensual sex.

Foz has posted before about how difficult-to-impossible it would be for humans to consistently apply the standards people push for, even if everyone could agree on those standards. These definitely aren’t the kinds of judgments current AI is capable of making.

I want to reblog this excellent addition, because it’s essentially what I put in my tags as well.

One of the things that’s so complicated about this conversation—and something both porcupine-girl and fozmeadows are hitting really well—is that for a lot of AO3 detractors, it’s not that people are writing stories about rape, incest, etc, but how they’re writing about them. Not “how dare you write an underage scene,” but rather “how dare you fetishize/romanticize/wank off to underage sex in your writing?” Forget about a bot figuring out if sex is consensual; what if it’s definitely not? Trying to find a line between merely depicting and romanticizing…is literally impossible, because all humans have had different experiences, will read and see things different ways. For that matter, I could write something meant to be horrifying and in no way sexy, and someone could still find it sexy. They could find the fact that my character finds it upsetting sexy, too! You can’t control the way someone reads your work, no matter how hard you try; you can’t control thought.

The big social media platforms are currently grappling with moderation at scale. Facebook is utterly incompetent, on both the automated side and the human side. YouTube has long been a shitshow on this front. Things are…clearly not going well at Tumblr! All of these efforts are inherently going to barrel right over context. Tumblr’s “is it nipple art tho” question is a great example, as is the blurring of any distinctions between erotica and porn.

AO3′s tagging system—which isn’t flawless, and relies on mutual trust across thousands and thousands of people—actually sort of deliberately removes context, on a platform level. If I tag something “noncon,” of course I can add more tags like, “but sexy tho” or “NOT SEXY THO JUST UPSETTING,” but generally, I’m trying to let people know that my story contains nonconsensual sex. That’s either a big backspace for people who don’t want to read that, regardless of context, or a flag for people who then step in and determine the context for themselves. And that interpretation, of course, will vary from reader to reader. But it shifts that decision from the platform to the reader—something that’s not going to work on a big social media platform, at least not in any way that I can envision. Certainly not on a site with traditional commercial pressures.

Roles on a Pirate Ship

heroineimages:

we-are-pirate:

we-are-rogue:

[by Mark Cookman / Tribality 1, 2, 3] @we-are-pirate, @we-are-scarlet-corsair

Officer Roles on a Pirate Ship

If you are running a game with pirates in it, then you should know
what the job entails. It’s not all boarding ships, counting booty, and
drinking rum like you might think. A great deal of hard work is required
to run a sailing ship with a law-abiding crew, let alone one populated
by pirates. In this essay we are going to examine the five principle
officers on board a pirate ship, their duties, and their
responsibilities. This is part one of a three part lesson. In the next
lesson we will examine the duties and responsibilities of other officers
and crew members with special duties. In the final lesson, we will look
at one very special group of crew members that are almost always
overlooked. Read on to learn what pirates expected of their primary
officers.

The principal officers of a pirate ship were the captain, the
quartermaster, the pilot, the boatswain, and the master gunner. On some
ships these positions were all elected by an equal vote of the crew and
on others the captain picked the crew members he wanted to serve in the
positions. The captain on a pirate vessel was almost always elected by
an equal vote of the crew. On a privateer vessel this was not very often
the case. Privateer captains were often the owners of the ship or were
given commission by their monarch to take a vessel to sea. So it follows
with the other officers. If the captain was elected, then generally all
of the officers were elected. If the captain was appointed or held his
position by means of ownership, then generally he picked the officers.
In either case, an officer on a pirate ship served at the whim of the
crew. Even a man picked by the captain would be booted down to a simple
crewman if he could not do his job. For the most part though, a person
elevated to serve as one of the principle officers did so for life. The
title of this article refers to the fact that most often the authorities
that captured, tried, and hung pirates concentrated on the five
principle officers of the ship. These officers were generally the most
intelligent and skilled crewmen on board the pirate vessel. They were
people that everyone else on board the ship admired for their ability to
do their job. Diligent action is the mother of respect on board a ship.

Captain

The captain, however he came to his position, was chosen for his
leadership, bravery, and cunning. The captain was responsible for the
ship and everything aboard her; every item and every man. He was
responsible for the overall decisions affecting the ship and her crew.
The captain decided where to sail and what to attack. He was the voice
of his crew to all beyond the ship. He often led his crew in battle. In
terms of daily duties, the captain kept a log of the voyage, managed the
affairs of the ship through the officers, and generally served a four
to six hour shift at the helm. The captain stayed in power by being
successful. As long as there are prizes to plunder, rum to drink, and
food to eat, the captain will not be voted out or mutinied against. It
is when things get lean that the captain must worry about crew voting
him unfit for command.

Quartermaster

The quartermaster (or first mate on a privateer vessel) was the
number two man on the ship. He was responsible for enforcing the ship’s
articles and administering punishment when necessary. The quartermaster
was the trustee of the ship and her crew. He directly represented the
crew to the captain. It was his responsibility to serve as a
counterbalance to the captain in decisions that might be hazardous to
the ship or the crew. A wise captain made no decisions that his first
mate didn’t support. The quartermaster took responsibility for prize
vessels and picked the treasure that the crew would take from a prize.
He was also responsible for counting the booty and splitting the shares.
Each day would find him working with his subordinate officers the
boatswain, the master gunner, and the master at arms to effectively run
the ship. The first mate also served a turn at the helm, generally a
four to six hour shift.

Pilot

The pilot was the number three man on the ship and often the most
educated. He served as the ship’s navigator and was generally the best
all around sailor aboard the ship. He was responsible for plotting the
ship’s course and maintaining that course. The pilot maintained all of
the ship’s charts and maps as well as the tools of navigation. He was
charged with keeping a daily log of every event relating to the sailing
of the ship. He recorded the depth, the currents, the wind patterns, the
ship’s location, the locations of reefs and sandbars, and the state of
the rigging. He reported directly to the captain. The pilot oversaw the
work of the sail-master and almost always had at least one assistant (a
pilot’s mate) to help him with his duties. The pilot and his mate both
served separate shifts at the helm in addition to taking readings from
the moon and stars to plot and maintain the course.

Boatswain

The boatswain was the number four man on the ship and often the most
feared by the crew. He was in charge of the provisions for the ship. He
maintained the stores of food, water, rum, gunpowder, shot, sails, rope,
wood, and tar required to keep the ship and crew fit for action. The
boatswain also directed the loading of cargo into the hold to maintain
the proper ballast to ensure level sailing. He was in charge of keeping
the watches on the ship and maintaining discipline among the deck crew.
He was responsible for the ship’s longboats and for picking a crew to
man the sweeps when the longboats were used. The boatswain was charged
with maintaining the ship’s seaworthy status. He oversaw the duties of
both the carpenter and the cook. The boatswain generally had a mate to
help him with his responsibilities. In general, his duties were to make
certain that all the work of running the ship was done. He reported to
the quartermaster. The Boatswain was often the most feared man on the
ship because his obligations often made him uncompromising. It was his
responsibility to keep everything “ship-shape”. Leniency was something
the quartermaster might give to the crew, but it was not something the
boatswain was in the position to give. Day and night, the boatswain
would drive the crew to do whatever work was required. He maintained the
watch log and reported any problems to the quartermaster.

Master Gunner

The master gunner was the number five man on the ship. He was
responsible for the care and cleaning of all firearms, culverin (deck
guns), and cannons on board the ship. He was also responsible for
training the crew in the use of both firearms and ship’s weaponry. The
master gunner picked and ran the gunnery crew. He reported to the
quartermaster, but was responsible to the entire ship to make certain
that the cannons hit the declared target. He was also responsible for
maintaining the inventory of powder and shot for all of the guns on the
ship. The master gunner was the only crew member besides the captain and
the quartermaster entrusted to carry a key to the ship’s powder
magazine. Additionally, the master gunner often led or picked hunting
parties when they were called for. His day to day duties mainly
consisted of drilling the gunnery crew and maintaining the guns.

The Next in Line to Hang – More Roles on a Pirate Ship

In this second part of a three part lesson dealing with the crew
positions aboard a pirate vessel, we are going to look at the
responsibilities of the Sail-master, the Carpenter, the Cook, the
Surgeon, and the Master at Arms. These were all lower officer positions
and were either voted upon or assigned by the captain as discussed in
the first part of this lesson. The sailors who served in these positions
were skilled laborers and, as such, their skills were always very much
in demand on a ship. They were almost always offered a greater share of
the treasure because of their skills. These were definitely crew members
that a pirate ship could not function without.

Sail-master

The Sail-master was the most experienced crewman in the rigging and
usually one of the best sailors on the ship. He was responsible for
maintaining the sails and the rigging. The Sail-master knew every knot,
line, rope, block and tackle in the rigging as well as how to repair
them all. He was also responsible for training and running the sail crew
as well as overseeing the making and patching of sails. The Sail-master
took orders from and reported to the pilot.

Carpenter

The Carpenter was a skilled wood worker, often with some shipwright
experience, who did all of the woodworking required by the crew. He was
primarily responsible for repairing damage to the wooden portions of the
ship and for plugging leaks that got too bad. (Ye should understand
right now, before ye go to sea, that all ships leak, mates. It’s just
when they really leak badly that you have to worry about it.) The
Carpenter was also responsible for the construction of barrels and
crates, as needed, to store cargo, as well as maintaining the tools of
his trade. He took orders from and reported to the Boatswain.

Cook

The Cook was one of the most important of the lower officers. He was
in charge of all matters relating to food on the ship. He made certain
there was enough food, water, and rum on board for the planned cruise.
He cooked the meals and suggested rationing when it was necessary. The
Cook butchered the meat brought back by hunting parties and was the only
man trusted to light a fire below decks. He maintained the necessary
tools for both cooking and butchering. The Cook took orders from and
reported to the Boatswain.

Surgeon

The Surgeon was likely one of the toughest men on the ship. He served
as the barber/doctor/emergency surgeon for the entire crew. He was
equally capable of shaving your beard and cutting off your damaged leg.
The Surgeon dealt with not only the sick and the wounded, but also the
dead. He, like the other lower officers, was responsible for maintaining
the necessary tools of his trade. The Surgeon took his orders from and
reported to the Quartermaster. It was rare for a ship to have a real
doctor and it was common for the carpenter or the cook to fill this role
as needed.

Master at Arms

The Master at Arms was often the most skilled warrior on the crew. He
was responsible for training the crew in hand to hand combat. He also
led the ship’s boarding parties and hunting parties when they were
necessary. The Master at Arms position was not a separate position on
every vessel and often these responsibilities fell to the Quartermaster.
When the Master at Arms position was filled on a ship, he took orders
from and reported to the Quartermaster.

These 5 core positions represent the Non-Commissioned Officers of a
pirate or privateer ship. These men all commanded other men on work
details and so their words carried great sway with the crew. It was
often from among these men that the next captain was chosen when a
captain lost his position through a vote of no confidence. Thus, these
were the men that the captain had to keep loyal to him to stay in
command of the ship.

And Hang the Musikers, Too – Even More Roles on a Pirate Ship

In this article, we will be looking at the makeup of the crew itself.
Remember that the only rule with pirates is that there are no rules; no
two crews of any two pirate ships were exactly the same. Even so, we
can narrow down some roles common to pirate/privateer crews based upon
the jobs that must be done aboard ship. Most simply put, pirate crews
are a mixture of brutes, gunners, swabbies, and musikers. Let’s examine
each category in turn.

Brutes

A great deal of hard work and heavy hauling is involved in just
sailing a tall-masted ship. In strong winds the canvas sails must be
man-handled by a deck crew that is stronger. Loading and unloading
supplies, most especially cannons or chests of gold, requires a number
of strong backs. This is why every ship has its share of brutes – big,
strong men capable of handling themselves no matter the work or the
fight. In addition to the tasks already mentioned, brutes would be key
men in hunting parties, ship boarding, and raiding groups as well. Keep
in mind that not all brutes need to be hulking bruisers. A wiry-tough
and dexterous hunter, skilled with both blades and long rifle, could be a
brute as well. Brutes, no matter their size, do not shrink from a hard
task. Men of this sort make up perhaps as much as ½ of a pirate crew,
but they will be mixed among the gunners and swabbies, not a stand alone
corp. Most of the men on a pirate or privateer ship were probably
gunners.

Gunners

Depending upon the size of their shot, each cannon required a crew of
either 3 or 4 men to load and fire it. So a sloop carrying 4 small guns
per side would require a minimum of 24 men to fully maintain them and
that does not include the officers directing the cannon fire. On a large
ship, like Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge, a full
gun crew would be 160 men dedicated only to firing the cannons. (It is
important to note here that Blackbeard had a total crew compliment of
125 on board the Queen Anne’s Revenge.) These crewmen would
have to be available 24/7 to do their job whenever required, but
otherwise might have no duties on the ship. There was double-duty in
most crews though. Most pirate ships didn’t keep a full compliment of
gunners like warships of the time did because fewer crew members meant
fewer shares and that meant more money for everyone when the treasure
was split. Gunners could make up between 1/3 to 2/3 of a crew.

Swabbies

Swabbies, or actual trained sailors, are the crew members responsible
for handling the rigging and the sails to keep the ship moving. These
are the guys and gals who climb the ratlines into the rigging and walk
the spars that jut from the masts. Swabbies sometimes fight from the
highest position that they can get to on their own ship and then leap
into the rigging of the enemy vessel when boarding. Often dexterous
fighters, swabbies are known for leaping into the fray, but sometimes
they hide in the rigging as deadly snipers. It might be surprising to
discover that skilled sailors usually comprised less than 1/3 of the
total crew compliment of the ship.

Musikers

It is difficult to prove that “musikers”, or musicians as we call
them, were ever a stand-alone part of a pirate crew. However, two
excellent examples from the pirate period demonstrate that they have
been a common part of most ships of war, pirate and privateer ships
included. The first example is from the early Seventeenth century. In
Captain John Smith’s advice concerning how to conduct a one-on-one naval
engagement he remarks when preparing to board one should, “… sound
Drums and Trumpets, and Saint George for England.” The second example
comes from the early Eighteenth century. In the articles of Captain
Bartholomew Roberts it is stated: “The Musikers to have Rest on the
Sabbath Day, but the other six Days and Nights, none without special
Favour.” When thinking about the musicians on board a ship in the 16th
to 18th centuries, one must not think of a band. That would be far too
organized a concept. There is no way to know how many crew members may
have been musicians, but one assumes that the number is not large.

It is likely that ships of this period had crew members who owned
musical instruments as varied as brass horns, mouth harps, fiddles, bag
pipes and accordions. Furthermore, sailors could gather numerous
instruments from the various ports of call their ship made. Examples
here are numerous: cowhide and goatskin drums from Africa, dried gourd
maracas from Cuba, bamboo drums and flutes from Hispaniola, and even
tambourines from Morocco. Pause a moment and consider the combined
sounds of all of the instruments mentioned here. Now you know why a band
is not the idea you want to have. The musicians were popular with the
crew, as they were entertainment as well as a valuable battle element.
The musicians played during meal times and during work breaks allowing
the crew some entertainment to break the monotony of long hours of
tiring work. This boost in moral was welcome at anytime, but was perhaps
the most effective when used in battle.

From stories of Bartholomew Roberts crew and others, we know that
when a ship with musicians approached another ship with the intention to
fight, the effects of the music could be terrifying to the enemy. The
musicians would play marches and other martial music. There were drum
rolls, trumpet and bugle calls, and perhaps even a piper given the
nationality of the crew. Add to this the noise of the ship’s cook
beating upon his pots and pans and the crew stamping their feet or
beating their weapons against the ship. Finally top this off with the
sounds of shouting, screaming, and shooting, both pistols and rifles as
well as cannons and deck guns. Your imagination can supply you with the
details of the scene. The intended result is achieved: the morale aboard
the pirate vessel is raised to a fevered pitch while the morale of
their intended prize is shaken. So do not forget that pirates and
privateers know the value of bardic inspiration when you run those
encounters.

Thanks for the tag!

Useful resource!

taraljc:

fangirlunderground:

roxolotl:

Look i dont wanna sound like a Fandom Mom or whatever but what do you think women over 25 or so are supposed to do? Do u really think theyre supposed to drop all their interests and just talk about taxes and marriage or whatever? It seems like 25+ year old fanboys do not receive this kind of “ooh cringe” reaction either. There are guys in their 40s with comic book collections and shit and people might think theyre a nerd at worst, not a freak who shouldnt be trusted

Thank you. Because, here’s the thing, I literally tried that. And this sounds really dramatic but it kind of ruined my life for a long time.

Once I got out of grad-school and started working, at exactly age 25, I figured it was time to get serious because I was “too old for this stuff” and frankly I was afraid of being judged.

I sold all my comics, I stopped reading fanfiction, I stopped playing video games. All of it. It’s not that I never, ever watched anything “geeky” or spent a weekend binge-reading a kink-meme, but when I did, it was rare and I’d feel guilty about it like it was time wasted. I’d keep it all to myself, you know? And without any kind of inspiration, I eventually stopped drawing. After all, I didn’t need it for my “serious job,” so why bother? Unfortunately, my former skill is so atrophied now it’s nearly lost, but worse than that, it’s stressful now instead of the thing I loved to do for most of my life.

What was I doing instead? Well, I’d work my miserable, toxic job, come home and worry about how far behind everyone else I was, and how weird I was compared to all my colleagues. I’d go out with people and do the things they liked doing, but I only pretended to. But I’m not great at that and pretending to be someone else ate me alive. Unsurprisingly, by 31, my anxiety and depression was not in a great place, and I fuckin’ snapped. Not just because of this stuff, of course, but it honestly contributed. I quit my job and left town.

Suddenly I was completely alone, no job, no friends, and no reason to pretend to be someone else. So, I started doing all the things I’d given up. I read all the fanfiction I wanted, I bought a Playstation and an SNES and played them for hours. I bought back every comic book I loved, watched every Marvel movie I missed, and caught up on my favorite characters. I started traveling around just going to cons for the first time (NYCC, GeekGirlCon, DragonCon, etc). In fact, at @geekgirlcon and DragonCon especially, I saw groups of women who were 60+, just fucking enjoying things, and it made me feel so much better about my future. I’m not even joking, I literally cry every time I think about it, because I never realized how scared I was about aging in a world that thinks I’m already a decade too old for the things I love. Suddenly, that wasn’t so scary.

And then I just stopped pretending that I wasn’t into this stuff. I mean all of it, even the stuff no one understand, even the stuff people openly make fun of, even smutty fanfiction.

And look, I’m not saying this cured my depression, or that everything is perfect. For one, I picked a city that’s awful for geeks and I’m trying to figure out where to move and how. For another, I lost six years of making like-minded friends, and it’s hard to find them now because we’re all so worried about being judged and online – the space that was always a refuge for me as a loner weirdo growing up – is now apparently a Children of the Corn. But I’m happier here, actually fucking liking things, than being the unobjectionable robot woman I’m apparently supposed to be.

I don’t expect anyone to actually be interested in this, or have gotten this far, but because I’m having feelings about turning 36 on Monday, I just want to tell anyone who is about to turn 25 that you should just tell people to go fuck themselves. It’s your life. You’re going to offend people no matter what you do, at least choose the direction that makes you happiest, because those people certainly aren’t going to pay for your fucking therapist bills, are they? 🦖

This is gonna sound weird to you guys, but when I first started writing fanfic and sending stories to fanzines to be published back in 1991, in my first fandom all of the fans and writers and editors and readers I met were shocked that I was 17 because they were all in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was the outlier. I was an aberration.

Wanna know when young people started discovering fandom en masse? In the mid 1990s, when AOL got their internet gateway.

All the folks who ran fannish mailing lists and conventions and published ‘zines and posted fanfic online were over 18, because email and IRC and Usenet and FTP sites and listservs were primarily used by adults because they were almost exclusively college students, government employees, and academics. And the users of gated communities like BBS, GEnie, Compuserv, and AOL all skewed older. Only Prodigy was actually aimed at kids, because prior to the mid-to-late 1990s, children weren’t getting online until they went to university.

And what kids found was the fandom that adults had built online, after being a part of it offline for decades.

Even when FFN was launched, the people who initially posted there were the same people who had been posting fanfic to the internet for a decade: THE GROWN-UPS.

So the idea that we’re meant to put away childish things is hilarious, cos for most of our lives, fandom was not a part of our childhoods. It was a part of our everyday adult lives.

fierceawakening:

isaacsapphire:

corpus-vak:

shieldfoss:

ms-demeanor:

shieldfoss:

argumate:

ms-demeanor:

argumate:

mitigatedextras:

argumate:

the wave of harassment allegations leads to amusing levels of tension in the discourse about whether men are “inherently” more aggressive or high libido

warm take on this discourse

“wider distribution” hypothesis applied to sexual harassing behavior – small number of “super-harassers” responsible for majority of harassment, mean level of sexual harassment is relatively low, women more average, therefore most super harassers are men

no idea if this take is true

spiders Harvey

Of the 1,882 men in the total sample, 120 (6.4%) met criteria for rape or attempted rape. A majority of these men, 80.8%, reported committing rapes of women who were incapacitated because of drugs or alcohol; 17.5% reported using threats or overt force in attempted rapes; 9.2% reported using threats or overt force to coerce sexual intercourse; and 10% reported using threats or overt force to coerce oral sex. […] .

Of the 120 rapists, 76 (63.3%) reported committing repeat rapes, either against multiple victims, or more than once against the same victim. In total, the 120 rapists admitted to 483 rapes, or 4.0 rapes each. However, this average is somewhat misleading. Since 44 of the 120 rapists admitted to only a single rape, the 76 repeat rapists actually accounted for 439 of the rapes, averaging 5.8 each (SD=7.7), significantly more than the single-act rapists (t=-4.1(118), p<.001). The median number of rapes for the repeat rapists was three. Figure 1 shows the frequency of rapists who committed single and multiple numbers of rapes.

The data also revealed that these 120 rapists did not confine their violence either to the sexual realm, or in many cases, to adults. Table 2 shows the numbers, percentages, and total number of acts of different forms of interpersonal violence committed by these men. A majority of these men, 70 of the 120 (58.3%), admitted to other acts of interpersonal violence, including battery, physical abuse and/or sexual abuse of children, and sexual assault short of rape or attempted rape. Including their 483 acts of rape, these 120 individuals admitted to a total of 1,225 different acts of interpersonal violence.

To provide an additional perspective on the relative level of interpersonal violence being committed by these repeat rapists, we compared the total number of acts of violence committed by non-rapists (n=1,754), single-act rapists (n=44), and repeat rapists(n=76). Non-rapists committed a mean of 1.41 acts of violence, compared to a mean of 3.98 for single-act rapists, and a mean of 13.75 for repeat rapists, differences that were statistically significant (F(2,1871) = 46.67, p<.001).

So I know this study is from 2002 but it’s kind of the seminal study on this sort of thing. Also all of this information was collected from men who had never been caught as rapists, so that’s fun. Also:

A majority of the undetected rapists in this sample were repeat offenders. Almost two-thirds of them raped more than once, and a majority also committed other acts of inter-personal violence, such as battery, child physical abuse, and child sexual abuse. These repeat rapists each committed an average of six rapes and/or attempted rapes and an average of 14 interpersonally violent acts. Within the universe of 3,698 violent acts that the 1,882 men in this sample were responsible for, the 76 repeat rapists by themselves accounted for 1,045 of that total. That is, representing only 4% of the sample, the repeat rapists accounted for 28% of the violence. Their level of violence was nearly ten times that of non-rapists, and nearly three and a half times that of single-act rapists.

The evidence that a relatively small proportion of men are responsible for a large number of rapes and other interpersonal crimes may provide at least a partial answer to an oft-noted paradox: namely, that while victimization surveys have established that a substantial proportion of women are sexually victimized, relatively small percentages of men report committing acts of sexual violence (e.g., Rubenzahl & Corcoran, 1998). In this sample of 1,882 men, 76 (4%) individuals were responsible for an estimated 439 rapes and attempted rapes.

So you know that thing where there’s someone in your DND group or intramural softball team or book club who you don’t leave alone with new members, or members of a particular gender, or who someone warned you about when you joined, or who a bunch of people have creepy stories about? That’s Spiders Harvey. This is a thing that happens.

Hey-o, another problem is that Spiders Harvey tends to isolate victims so they can’t talk to one another and realize they weren’t alone. With literal Harvey Weinstein this has started to break down, but this is true in your life as well.

Have you had a creepy interaction with someone in a group you’re part of? Talk to other people about it. Ask if it’s happened before. Report it to the group leader if you have one.

I had no idea that a dude in my social group who kept pressuring me into touching him and calling me a bitch when I wouldn’t had groped other women until I blew up about it and stories started coming out.

I had no idea that the dude who shot upskirts of me was doing it to other women in the group until I found his website where he had published the pictures and I saw two of my friends there as well.

There’s this intense pressure not to talk about this stuff, this feeling of “I don’t wanna rock the boat” or “I was stupid, I shouldn’t have let this happen to me” or “God, it’s not serious, relax, don’t be so uptight” but holy shit please talk about it.

As much as it fucking sucks please talk about this shit, tell your friends, tell people around you, and believe people when they tell you that something has happened to them.

If a creepy fucker in your friend group has groped someone and gotten away with it they’re probably going to do it again. And again. And again. Don’t let them. Tell someone what has happened, believe people when they report a problem, keep an eye out for sexually abusive behavior, and boot them the fuck out if it’s clear they’re a Spiders Harvey.

Everything is awful. Keep yourself safe.

Australian journalist Tracey Spicer called for reports of harassment in local media and received reports from 500 women naming 65 men, so that’s a solid 8:1 ratio even before you consider that probably half of those women were naming Don Burke in particular.

So you know that thing where there’s someone in your DND group or intramural softball team or book club who you don’t leave alone with new members, or members of a particular gender, or who someone warned you about when you joined, or who a bunch of people have creepy stories about? That’s Spiders Harvey. This is a thing that happens.

…no, I don’t?

Every time I hear about this kind of thing in the news, I wonder what hell groups other people are members of.

For anyone who is generally unfamiliar with this concept, it’s called the missing stair and it was coined by @pervocracy – read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

As to what groups I’m part of – lots!

Places where I’ve specifically seen this be a problem are: newsrooms, hacker conferences, the philosophy wing of my college humanities building, D&D groups, a loose group of regulars at a coffee shop, kink groups, the local industrial and goth scene, a high school art group, comic shops, maker spaces, DC/2600 meetings, aaaaand roller derby (actually you know what, all women’s sports I’ve ever been close to that have men coaching have had this issue with some of the coaches in the league).

I think that’s it.

Do you want some theories? I have some theories!

A) Let’s be controversial right of the bat – this shit is more prevalent in geek spaces. Geeks are more used to feeling powerless and less aware of (or give lower priority to) social norms. This allows abusers to take advantage of people who are already unsure of their standing in the group or in their lives AND take advantage of the “I dunno, maybe this is normal, this doesn’t seem TOO weird” line of thought for somewhat off-kilter behavior.

ALSO MOTHERFUCKERS AND I HAVE A SERIOUS ISSUE WITH THIS – Geeks are unwilling to ostracize members of the group (at least overtly). That’s why some of this shit gets extremely toxic: if you speak up about someone hurting you you are being bad and mean and they just don’t understand social norms, why are you trying to exclude them? Gross. Gross gross gross. So sometimes what you’ll see is someone repeatedly just “not understanding social norms” until the people hurt by this leave the group for their safety, which allows the abuser to stay, and the surrounding folks who don’t want to ostracize anyone can safely say they didn’t push out the abuser over “drama” and the other people chose to leave and weren’t forced out.

There are comic shops and game shops that I don’t go to because “that’s just how he is” and “you have to be patient with him, he doesn’t socialize a lot” and “well we can’t just make him leave, he’s been around forever” are phrases that get thrown around too much.

B) This shit is extremely difficult to get rid of in casual groups that don’t have a formal hierarchy.

But we’re egalitarians, but it’s a meritocracy, but it’s not fair to have one leader.

I don’t care, write yourself some bylaws. The issue I’m currently having with 2600 meetups is rooted in this. No one is in charge, the meetings are open to the public, and we don’t have a posted harassment policy, so no one has the authority to say “hey, this abusive person is banned.” If you try to bring it up to the group as a whole (“hey, this person doesn’t listen when women specifically tell him not to touch them, let’s not have him around”) you get the “maybe he doesn’t know social boundaries” thing and a lot of wishy-washy dithering about how a ban would be enforced and nothing ends up happening. And then I have to be the asshole who says out loud in front of him and new attendees “hey, don’t be alone with this guy, and if you don’t want him touching you make that clear” and it’s building to a fight and I fucking hate it.

A long time ago I was on a board for a college group and we had to remove an elected member (it was a journalism group and we discovered that the norcal VP had plagiarized several of his articles, a clear violation of our ethics). Up to that point there had been no policy in place for how to remove someone but we had a hierarchy in place so that we could write a rule and vote on it and create a policy for how to remove someone and what they could be removed for. It was *such* a fucking relief.

Some makerspaces I know have a bit of a hierarchy, with keyholders having more say-so than regular visitors, but getting rid of (minor, like just groping not rape) abusers is damn near impossible in something like a D&D group or a book club where everyone casually gets together and no one wants to be the dick who says “you gotta go, you’re a problem and we want you out.” It’s *hard* to pull a Mean Girls in a casual context. It’s incredibly difficult and counter to all of our socialization to look a person in the face and say “we decided we don’t want to be around you anymore, don’t come back.” That’s hard to do when breaking up with a romantic partner, it feels even worse to do it to someone who is basically an acquaintance. There’s a level of intimacy there that makes it difficult to have that conversation in a group that otherwise isn’t very intimate.

C) Having a harassment policy or code of conduct in a group is vital to getting rid of people who do this shit.

So for a very very long time the DefCon code of conduct was “don’t be a dick.” That’s it. That was the whole code. Seems like you’d have a lot of leeway but it’s broad enough to be useless.

Because otherwise we should have used it to ban Cap’n Crunch decades ago. “Don’t be a dick” doesn’t include things like giving teen boys “energy massages.” Is a piggyback ride “being a dick?” What about asking someone to do pushups. What if the person asking you to do pushups is extremely famous in the scene and was foundational to creating the scene?

Cap’n Crunch was the very first thing I was warned about at my very first con when I was a wee little teen in 2005. He was known to be creepy around teen boys and young men even back then. Because I was a smoker I was assigned Draper Duty – if I saw John Draper talking to a teenager I was to go over and talk to the kid while smoking to chase Draper away. Draper hated cigarette smoke and it was the one surefire way to keep him from asking the boy in question back to his room for an “energy massage.” Boys who attended the cons were told to come ask me for a cigarette if Draper was bugging them.

That was in 2005. He finally got banned from DefCon this month. Proactively, before the con, of course, when there’s a ton of discourse about sexual harassment and how to respond to it.

DefCon says they couldn’t ban him before because they had rumors but no specific complaints against him. Their policy was nonspecific – it didn’t define “being a dick” well enough to include “rubbing your boner against teenagers while getting piggyback rides from them” as being a dick.

This was a policy that was so broad as to be useless (the current DefCon Code of Conduct isn’t much better).

So institute a code of conduct for your game nights. Put one together for your derby bouts. Buy hosting, put up a wiki, make sure the link to the code of conduct is easily findable and prominently linked on the homepage. And then enforce your code of conduct evenly. Woman who hugs people even if they say they’re not really into hugs gets the same warning as guy who “jokingly” blocked someone’s exit. Woman who feels like it’s okay to grab someone’s boobs gets the same ban as guy who feels like it’s okay to grab someone’s boobs.

D) Everything is awful and sometimes you can’t get away. (AKA why Shieldfoss’s statement can be read as victim blaming)

Every time I hear about this kind of thing in the news, I wonder what hell groups other people are members of.

Hi this has happened to me at…………literally every job I’ve had except my current job (which has different issues, like a boss who has threatened to fire me if I get pregnant).

At my last job I was sexually assaulted by a coworker (grabbing my ass in front of customers, holding me against a door demanding I kiss him) who “everyone knew about” and by my boss, the owner of the coffee shop, who two other employees then told me had approached them for sex (he got drunk after a breakup and as I was hugging him to comfort him he started forcing my head and hands onto his penis).

The moment I was signing my noncompete to work at my first real newspaper job my Editor In Chief introduced me to the paper’s film critic, who wouldn’t let me stand and instead held me in the chair and massaged my shoulders while greeting me (and I do feel that it’s pertinent to point out that I was 20 and this was a man in his 50s). For five minutes. While he looked down my shirt from behind. My boss obviously knew this kind of thing happened because *she watched it happen* but it was a reporter who told me not to stand next to the film critic at parties or staff meetings.

Now look. I am aware that this happens to me an unusual amount. From the informal polling of my friends I am aware that I have a higher-than-typical number of creepy, awful, assault-y interactions under my belt (if you’re interested in reading about revictimization this article itself isn’t great but links to several actually good studies – it’s all extremely sad and I don’t wanna talk about it). I’ve even been assaulted by women and queer folks and realize this isn’t an exclusively cis straight male issue (though yes, more straight men have done shit like this to me personally than other women or queer folks have).

What kind of groups am I hanging out with? Shooting sports groups and hackers and geeks and comic nerds and musicians and athletes and boring fucking office workers and coffee shop employees. I am hanging out with normal groups of normal people. That’s the really horrifying and upsetting thing about this avalanche of assault accusations, the dawning and ongoing realization that people who do awful things are normal and likeable and friendly and funny and they make things you like. Fun people who do things you like do awful things that would make you sick to your stomach.

It’s painful and awkward to tell a friend you’ve known for years not to come back to your monthly potluck because you heard that she touched someone inappropriately last month so instead whispers and rumors get started and suddenly a stair is missing. Everyone who’s been around knows to hop over it and you can have a good time, but new people have to be warned and there’s always the possibility that something awful is going to happen later.

What kind of groups am I hanging out with? Pretend that instead of spiders harvey or that random hacker it’s your brother you’re hearing the accusation about, or your mom, or your dad’s college roommate whose kids you were raised with and are best friends with, or your best friend, or your spouse. How easy is it to clean up the group when the problem is the person who founded the group, or is someone who has been coming for years but their accuser is a newbie? How easy is it to clean up your group when you like the person accused better than you like the accuser?

The film critic at my job who held me in a chair and stared down my shirt was someone who almost everyone thought was a perfectly nice guy. The employer who put my hands on his penis is a dad now and happily married and still owns a coffee shop where he’s adored by the people in that small town. The hacker who published photos of my ass and my underwear had provided security for conferences for over a decade and was trusted by the organizers of the conferences to help keep attendees safe – I was just some new chick stirring up trouble but he had helped them clean puke off their clothes and gone to their kid’s birthday parties.

This discussion came up a few weeks ago and I brought up the importance of making your own safe spaces and relentlessly policing them and this is *why* that is so important to me. I’ve never been assaulted in my punk band that is me and three other people, one of whom I’ve known for fifteen years. I’ve never been assaulted in the bi ladies art group that meets once a month and colors in the park. It’s goddamned amazing to know when I hang out with these little groups that I’m going to be safe and not scared at least for a little while.

But these aren’t the groups I get to be around all the time. The hacker scene has become a part of my job. Other jobs have been places where I’ve been assaulted. I thought derby would be safe but it wasn’t so I left. I thought D&D would be safe but it wasn’t so I left. I thought the comic shop would be safe but it wasn’t – you get the picture.

I’m sure @shieldfoss didn’t intend to blame victims of assault for making bad choices and choosing to be where assaulters are but that’s kind of how this “who are you associating with” attitude comes off because a) it’s hard to avoid rapists – statistically they’re more common than trans folks and folks with celiac disease and if you interact with enough people realistically you’re just going to be around a rapist at some point and b) sometimes it’s not a choice. Sometimes it’s your boss or your coworker or someone you have to network with in your field or a family member or the spouse of a family member who most people would honestly feel too awkward to challenge. I would *fucking love it* if you could say “Tom grabbed my ass and pulled up my shirt in front of customers, I’d like to make sure I’m not scheduled with him anymore” and not fear some kind of punitive change to your scheduling. It would be goddamned amazing if saying “James asked me to allow myself to get groped in front of witnesses because he didn’t believe me about my assailant” didn’t mean walking away from a group of friends you’d spent ten years building relationships because they think you’re just stirring shit.

There’s only so much you can retreat. There are only so many times you can back away. It’s tremendously upsetting to me that I’ve just accepted a certain amount of grabbing, catcalling, fondling, and attempted rape is what I have to put up with if I want to keep doing things that I enjoy doing (going to conferences, going to metal festivals, going to parties, going to monthly tech meetups) or keep doing things that I have to do (go to work, pump gas, buy groceries). It is exhausting and upsetting and I am so goddamned tired all the time.

(all of that by the way ties into the revictimization thing – you become resigned to it and get worse at asserting boundaries and accept that this is a part of life which is why some of you reading this may have noticed I’m something of a grind on this topic, gotta keep making the point that this is not normal, this is not something that you should accept, this is something to stand up and complain about even if that does mean you lose basically everyone you thought was a friend goddamnit)

I’m very happy for you if your friend group and all of your acquaintances doesn’t include at least one creepy person who just kind of gets overlooked. Keep up the good, work, exclude the creepy rapey people.

But please recognize that doing so is legitimately difficult for a lot of people.

When I was 10 I had a friend whose older brother was a child rapist. At 20 he’d been convicted of raping his step-sister and had spent time in prison for it. I didn’t know that at the time – I just went over to my friend’s house and we played in the pool and had sleepovers. Her parents never left us alone with him. They knew he was that missing stair, but he was their fucking son. They didn’t broadcast warnings or throw him out of the house, they just made sure he was never alone with his sisters or their friends ever again. And given my history I kind of wish I’d known about it so I could have made that choice myself but, fuck, I get not broadcasting that. I get trying to manage that secret and hiding that history.

That guy who put pics of my ass online? He gave one of the guys in the group his first car. He has worked with a dozen guys in the group and gotten at least five of them jobs. It’s fucking difficult to weigh “person who has been generous to me and helped me find work when I was in a tough spot” against “who is this girl again?” and I really do see why people go “well I don’t want him hurting people but I don’t want to hurt him either, we’ll just keep the problem from happening again.” In some ways it’s actually kind of admirable and I can respect that the people in that middle position are taking up the weight of trying to keep people safe and happy.

But, fuck, it doesn’t work and it sucks. It’s tacit approval, it’s saying “I’ll let you get away with it just this once” which just encourages them to get away with it again.

I’m going to say it again: everything is awful, keep yourself safe.

Please believe people who report abuse, please enforce your own boundaries, please recognize that some people have a difficult choice between “saying something about abuse” and “paying rent” and you can’t make that choice for them. And please, if at all possible, kick assault-y rapey people out of your groups, and support people who do the difficult work of saying “you aren’t welcome here anymore.”

Ugh. That became an awful lot of wordvomit. Not mad at anyone in this particular conversation, just so goddamned tired all the goddamned time.

That sounds terrible. It’s a completely different world to the one I live in where I know literally zero people who there are rumors about through my entire family, hobby groups and work environment.

I dunno, maybe I’m just a top tier introvert who people don’t tell things to but that

just

it doesn’t sound right either.

Maybe it’s a Scandinavia/America thing, where my boring bourgeoisie life just is not at any scale comparable to how things are in Average America but that sounds wrong too.

I definitely don’t blame anybody for ending up in these groups, you’re supposed to be able to just show up without ever worrying about hidden creeps, I just don’t understand how it happens because in my experience, groups don’t have hidden creeps.

I dunno, maybe I’m Good Groups Georg and my experience shouldn’t be counted.

I would fully believe that this is an America/other places issue, where Americans (unsurprisingly) assume everywhere else is like America.

I am not American: I don’t have a The Creepy One to point to in any of the groups I’ve ever been a part of, going back decades. There are socially inept ones who are ultimately harmless but have poor understanding of what is appropriate (but not in a touch-y, predator-y way), and I know people who have stopped going to groups because of that social ineptitude.

I’ve seen another post going around saying that, even if you’re a man and you don’t know about it, there is a The Creepy One, and the women just aren’t telling you about him, which strikes me as doubling down on this attitude.

Maybe it’s the type of groups that I move in (low number of women, but never uniformly men). In the queer spaces I’m adjacent to (but close enough to know the gossip), I know of people who are kept at arms length for various reasons, but not because of their being The Creepy One, more for being duplicitous.

I’m not sure how many Good Groups Georg you can have before it stops being a Georg and starts being the norm.

I don’t think that “geek spaces” is exactly it (and that the hacker cons are, by every account I’ve gotten of them going back for years, so rife with missing stairs I don’t get the impression that it could rightly be called a staircase) but spaces where people don’t think there’s an alternative. If this is the only [x] in driving distance, or the only acceptable social outlet around for [y] people, then leaving is that much harder (and expulsion that much more a nuclear option) Also, low status people are always prime targets, so social spaces for low status people are basically hunting fish in a barrel.

That’s also a prerequisite for bullying: the victim can’t leave, or is seriously discouraged from leaving, by forces outside the bully. In my own experience, bullying and sexual harassment are extremely close and somewhat overlapping categories.q

And, let’s be honest, the people who make a stink are usually either mentally unstable, making a power play, stupid/new and failing to understand that they’re trashing their own chances socially/professionally, or actually an outsider who doesn’t care.

“ALSO MOTHERFUCKERS AND I HAVE A SERIOUS ISSUE WITH THIS – Geeks are unwilling to ostracize members of the group (at least overtly). That’s why some of this shit gets extremely toxic: if you speak up about someone hurting you you are being bad and mean and they just don’t understand social norms, why are you trying to exclude them? Gross. Gross gross gross. So sometimes what you’ll see is someone repeatedly just “not understanding social norms” until the people hurt by this leave the group for their safety, which allows the abuser to stay, and the surrounding folks who don’t want to ostracize anyone can safely say they didn’t push out the abuser over “drama” and the other people chose to leave and weren’t forced out.”

This is absolutely a thing, and why I worry about some of the mental health/disability discourse on here. Yeah, it’s awful if your default instincts are “do these things that other people tend to find creepy and not know why.” But if that’s a pattern, sooner or later you might just have to go “people consistently don’t seem to like this. Maybe I should only do it around people I know very well who have told me it doesn’t bug them.”

asteraceaeblue:

minjiminjiminji:

XKCD’s excellent presentation on historical global temperature and anthropogenic global warming.

[After setting your car on fire] “Listen, your car’s temperature has changed before.”

For the “Earth’s climate has changed before” crowd.

gallusrostromegalus:

splinteredstar:

thebibliosphere:

gallusrostromegalus:

thebibliosphere:

thebibliosphere:

Sometimes when I’m sad I like to imagine what would happen in a crossover universe between Discworld and Harry Potter, and what Granny Weatherwax would make of their style of magic.

But then I think about more important things, like what would have happened if Granny Weatherwax ever met Albus Dumbledore, and I can’t help but feel a whole lot of shit could have been avoided if he’d had a good clip round the ear and a strong talking to about the whole “my hands are tied” bullshit that enabled years of abuse and suffering at the hands of adults in a position of authority over young, vulnerable people.

Like oh, this spell requires the bond of blood to keep him safe, all right. So that just means we’re not going to hold these adults accountable for their torment and abuse? I think the entire fuck not, Albus.

Snape is a double agent who is actually working for the greater good. All right, but that doesn’t stop him from being an absolute fucking shit weasel who shouldn’t be around children until he learns to control himself and works out his issues in a safe and sane manner, what the fuck, Albus.

You have an entire school system that ascribes to ideas of inherent morality when in fact this is a thing that needs to be taught? Well no wonder there’s one house in particular that keeps going off the rails, you keep telling them they’re evil. Tell people something for long enough they’ll start to believe you. There’s nothing wrong with being selfish and cunning, sometimes that’s what it takes to survive. Teach them how to use those traits for good. As strength. My land, my home, my people (not my daughter, you bitch) how dare you try to hurt them. Teach them, Albus, you have to bloody teach them and realize that evil isn’t born. It’s made. In a thousand small deplorable ways. And it starts with treating people like things and I cannot be having with this.

Of course there’s also the other flipside to this thought process, which is imagining Gytha “Nanny” Ogg shouting “watcher Molly” as she thumps Bellatrix Lestrange on the back of the head with a cauldron, and drops her like a fucking stone. Later they’ll sit together and grieve, later there will be time to pick up the pieces and mourn. But for now there are things to fight for, people to keep alive. And people to keep from doing what they shouldn’t ever have to do, so you find a way to do it for them, by hook, crook or blunt force trauma.

And because my head wont let go of this thought:

“You always was a right little miss,” she said, taking a puff from her pipe and resettling her weight with a hefty bounce as the younger witch struggled to get out from under Nanny’s considerable girth. “Giving yourself airs and graces and such. Pretending you was too good to scrub a pot. Well, let me tell you something, Mistress Lestrange, you ain’t fit for nothing no more except maybe a noose. And if I had my way that might be the end of it. But we don’t do things like that no more, we don’t rule by blood.”

“Then you’re weak,” Lestrange shot back, still struggling to claw her way free. “A weak, old woman with nothing left but tricks up your fat sleeve.”

Nanny puffed in silence for a few more moments, then reached up her sleeve. “And your wand, dearie. Walnut is it? With a dragon heartstring core? Very nice, painting it black was a bit much, but you always were fond of your dramatics.”

She pulled out her own wand, holding it out under Bellatrix’s nose, whose face went cross eyed and then wide with panic.

“You know, I’ve only ever heard of Priori Incantatem,” she said, puffing on the end of her pipe until the pit glowed cherry red then white hot and she exhaled smoke like a dragon, “but I wasn’t about to risk it, not in front of all those kiddies. But I reckon now might be a good time…”

Also, for your consideration. Feegles.

“Haul yoo, aye yoo, the great big ugly gangly scunner wi-oot a nose. Can ye sew? Well stitch this.”

Harry watched in consternation as Voldemort staggered back, dropped to the ground like a ton of bricks and lay still.

“That’s it?” he demanded, lowering his wand. “That’s all you had to do?”

Rob
Anybody, perched on his shoulder, looked up at the young wizard out the
corner of the eye, which was to say he looked him in the nostrils.

“Weell,”
he said, gesturing towards the chaos that had been unleashed as the
full force of the Nac Mac Feegle was unleashed upon the band of Death
Eaters, primarily by running up the inside of their trousers. “That’s
the thing about the lads. Once they’ve decided tae dae something, they
dae it good and hard.”

“But you just headbutted him!”

“Aye, weill,” Rob said, feeling as though the lad wasn’t quite grasping the practicality of the situation, “he might be a bloody great dark bigjob wizard, but he cannae cast a spell wi-oot a heid.”

Ok but the one I want to see is Dolores Umbridge vs Munstrum Ridcully, becuase that would be the Petty Academic Slapfight of doom.

Because Ridcully, for all his faults, probably understands that the actual learning of magic relies on a certain degree of both freedom and madness and sometimes explosions.

And Umbridge would crawl right up his skin with her concept of a “Defense Against The Dark Arts” Course, and in the middle of a lecture on recent runes, would go on a “tangent” on the history of various dark wizards and the means by which they were defeated and here Why Don’t We Have A Practical Outside, The Weather Is Nice (The weather is not nice. It’s Scotland. In Late November.) But everyone is really curious to see the old man actually take his wand out for once, only to discover that that’s not a wand at all, that’s a Burleigh & Stronginthearm and they’re all going to pass it around and whoever shoots the weathervane off the top of Ravenclaw tower gets 50 points. Hannah Abbot puts a bolt through Umbridge’s window, taking out a kitten plate and gets 100 points.

Fred and George turn the third floor corridor into a Swamp and Umbridge is pleased to hear Ridcully bellowing at the Weasley boys about “BLOODY INSONSIDERATE, NEVER HAVE I EVER MET SUCH WRETCHEDLY-” but the second she’s around the corner it changes to “-brilliant young men, how much is this setup you have here? That potions-master could do with some aggravated moisturizing. Speaking of moisturizing, what would it take to get you two gentlemen to work on the faculty baths? Disgustingly substandard, nowhere to put your nail trimmings-”

Ridcully would like the students there too, I think. Especially the Slytherins, because he’s perfectly aware how important being a cunning bastard and willing to get your hands dirty or bloody if needed is, especially in the world of Magical Academia. They’re socially intelligent and disenchanted with the system, not Evil, Albus. The Malfoy boy would be a lot less trouble if he had something to do besides practicing subject’s he’s bored with. Fratricide, perhaps. I’m kidding Albus! (he’s only sort of kidding. Maybe not murder. Just turn him into a toad and keep him as a familair in a bowl on the mantlepiece.)

He’d be so mad about the Chamber of secrets though. Potter! A Basilisk! Why didn’t you bring the head back up it’d be magnificent hanging over the great hall.
Oh I see.
Well why didn’t you go BACK? Perfectly good potion ingredients going to waste, doesn’t that brooding mop of a potions master teach you anything about looti- er, collecting spell components?

I forgot I wrote this haha, and I’m glad @gallusrostromegalus made it better.

Okay but feagles and house elves tho

Obeyin’ the hag is one thing, but any hag that’d that inna worth the title

(Dobby takes it up first, under his breath: “no lords and no masters”)

Havelock Vetenari is not a man to “Go Spare”, and certainly not without good cause but that shambling mountain of paperwork and prejudice they call “The Ministry Of Magic” is several thousand good reasons. He doesn’t even WANT to take over this disaster but he can’t rest so long as it continues to exist.

But. He’s better than that. Why waste time in pointless rage when there are things he can actually do to fix this?

“Mr. Lipvig.” He says, conversationally. “Did you know that the currency conversion rates haven’t changed since Gringotts was founded? Seventeen silver sickles to a gold galleon since the 1100’s”

He doesn’t really need to say anything else. Moist blinks a few times, then gradually begins to vibrate as every instinct he possess is called to the forefront.

“They’re just down the street if you wanted to see their facilities-”

Moist’s chair actually spins with the force of his rapid departure.“