"Meanwhile in Tucson"
“Bondi has now made public statements assessing the facts and the law of the Signal case while resisting calls for an investigation. These are simply astounding actions by a sitting attorney general. “The Justice Department’s approach thus far stands in contrast with its customary role of examining serious national-security breaches,” the WSJ reported in the most understated possible way. The abiding concern all along has been that Trump would place loyalists at the Justice Department in part to protect himself and his administration from legal consequences for their wrongdoing – a permanent coverup mechanism to ignore, bury, and disregard executive branch lawlessness. Pam Bondi is eagerly filling the role of a loyalist attorney general. This is what it looks like.”
— Pam Bondi Takes Point On Covering Up Trump’s Signal Fiasco
It is with the deepest frustrations that I must report Microsoft has pushed out Copilot onto Microsoft Word no matter what your previous settings were. If you have Office because you paid for it/are on a family plan/have a work/school account, you can disable it by going to Options -> click on Copilot -> uncheck 'Enable Copilot'.
(Note, you may not see this option if you haven't updated lately, but Copilot will still pop up. Updating should give you this option. I will kill Microsoft with my bare hands.)
In addition, Google has forced a roll-out of it's Gemini AI on all American accounts of users over 18 (these settings are turned off by default for EU, Japan, Switzerland, and UK, but it doesn't hurt to check).
To remove this garbage, you must go to Manage Workspace smart feature settings for all your Gmail/Drive/Chat and turn them off. Go to Settings -> See all settings -> find under "Genera" the "Google Workspace smart features" -> turn smart feature setting off for both Google Workspace and all other Google products and hit save. (If you turned off the smart settings in your Gmail, it never hurts to open Drive and double-check that they're set to off there too.)
Quick Edit: I found the easiest way to get to the Smart Feature settings following the instructions above was to do it through Drive. Try that route first.
Now is the time to consider switching to Libre Office if you haven't already.
If you see this on your dashboard, reblog this, NO MATTER WHAT and all your dreams and wishes will come true.
One of my long term fandom friends (back from ye olde message board days of yore) has been posting for weeks about how her teenage daughter is “out of control” and she just posted in the facebook group about how her daughter has ruined Christmas by deciding to be a lesbian and the whole group just went “Karen, you’ve been writing gay m/m slash fic for three decades” and she went “but that’s different, that’s not REAL” and I’ve never tried to actively set someone on fire with my brain before but
So a lot has gone on in the last little bit. NASA recently was ordered to scrub their site of women's contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, even took down their page celebrating women's history month and all the contributions they've made to NASA. So I did a thing and crawled through the wayback machine to find some articles, and decided to put this right here because fuck the government, fuck the orange in charge who told them to scrub their site, and fuck NASA for throwing their people under the bus and bowing to this authoritarian nonsense. This version of the site still has articles on some important figures like Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a space shuttle, and ISS chief scientist Jennifer Buchli and chief deputy scientist Meghan Everett, who, in their words, "-provide the science strategy and make science recommendations for the International Space Station program, and help make sure all of the science on the International Space Station goes smoothly, from preparing for launch to conducting research on the space station with the scientists and astronauts and returning the science to Earth."
the big three questions of media analysis: what the author wanted to say, what they actually said, and what they didn’t know they were saying
the solution to the systematic (and purposeful) destruction of the environment is not simply “no one ever touches nature again because humans are not a part of nature and should leave it alone” lmao. colonialism has destroyed the environment in ways which are targeted specifically toward indigenous people first, as well as impoverished communities who suffer the negative affects of environmental damage first. the response is not the self-deprecating and humanity-as-conglomerate attitude taken on by everyone from vegans to leftists to apolitical worriers… a solution is not to point and cry and say “think how much better animals would be without us!” because not only is human life as valuable and something you should be concerned over, not only should you think critically about the ways in which you define that “us” clause, you should also remember the human species is part of the ecosystem
The worst thing you can do, as someone who has recently realised they are transfem, is to let terves and transphobes convince you cis women will never accept you.
I was told that when I came out everyone would reject me. That I would find myself isolated from the world, and from other women especially, who would react to me with horror and revulsion.
In reality, within the first months of coming out, in no particular order:
My sister's reaction on my coming out was, "Right, so I have a sister instead of a brother. Cool. I'm taking you clothes shopping tomorrow."
A friend, when she learned I am a woman, immediately invited me to her women-only, girls-night-out birthday party the following week.
Another friend, when a friend of hers expressed doubts about my gender, immediately shut them down and reaffirmed I am a woman.
I went camping with a group of friends, and we had two tents, one for the boys and one for the girls; I was unsure as to which I should enter, to which a girl friend responded by grabbing me and physically dragging me inside the women's tent.
In the women's bathroom at a movie theatre a random woman, whom I'd never seen before and haven't seen since, stopped me as I was going into a stall, to warn me there was no toilet paper in there, because she'd just used the last of it.
All of these, and more, some from friends, some from complete strangers. All within a few months, as a trans woman who hadn't started medical transition yet, and was very visible as being a trans woman.
I've had some people reject me, true, but the vast majority, including almost all cis women, accepted me as a sister with open arms.
Cis women are cool. It's terves who are bigots.
THAT one's goin on the list too now!