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affinity.bsky.social
Harmony. | Collar of Worlds
@affinity.bsky.social
110 followers 51 following 1.4K posts
The thing that controls, even if it's also not what does the controlling. 18+. Most pronouns work.

Author of The Place Where We Can Stop Running, a Human Domestication Guide novel: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58402522

AD: @cayenaleva.bsky.social
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affinity.bsky.social
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_n_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2 big CW for slurs, but this is quite literally in the white supremacist playbook, and this article is from 2017. We still don't know how to counter it effectively at scale as a society.
An excerpt from the linked article. Its text is reproduced below. Lulz The tone of the site should be light. Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self- deprecating humor - I am a racist making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don't take myself super-seriously. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas [slur]s. But that's neither here nor there.
December 26, 2025 at 11:33 AM
affinity.bsky.social
✅
A crop of the 1877 painting of the Sermon on the Mount by Carl Bloch, edited to be a meme. Jesus, in the top right, is preaching outdoors with a large crowd gathered all around him. The meme text follows: Jesus: Love your neighbour as yourself Onlooker: Who is my neighbour? Jesus: It's whoever you were hoping I wouldn't say
July 16, 2025 at 8:48 AM
affinity.bsky.social
I grew up on these streets
An image of Clock Town, from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. A brick courtyard contains a thatch awning, a half-built tower with two green-clad construction workers tinkering with it, and abstract designs painted in blues and greens along the walls. A clock tower sits prominently at the back, with an intricate face design of red, yellow, blue and cyan. A hallway through to darkness (a loading zone to the next area) can be seen on the left.
November 5, 2024 at 12:59 PM
affinity.bsky.social
I'm still chewing over Georg Barkas' "The Year In Researching Intimacy", which changed a lot of how I looked at my own relationships and put into words things I was searching for ways to talk about for a while. hazlitt.net/feature/year...
In a scientific intimacy, we might do something that exhibits our own vulnerability instead of constantly asking for the openness of the other. The technical things of intimacy are the ones we know individually but are completely and utterly in the dark about how they will behave when we arrange them in ways we are not used to. The technical things of a scientific intimacy are almost never not obscure or hidden. They are in plain sight and available and even practised, but their arrangement in novel and interesting formations has been restricted by societal norms and so we feel like we can’t use them in any other way. The opposite is true; every encounter, every touch, every kiss can be arranged in a way that it asks rather than tells. Those questions are not those of a false shyness but rather about who the other is. To be intimate with someone is, in this sense, a genuine interest in the other person and to be moved by them. What we learn from a scientific intimacy is more than just another way of looking at the term “intimacy” itself but to look away from that obscure, meaningless construct of intimacy as merely being close to one another. It is an invitation to take the term literally and with it a whole machinery of possibilities. To view intimacy scientifically—that is, to look at how science makes itself familiar with the world—means first and foremost to not assume in advance who the other is but to experiment and to be surprised. It means that we might find properties of one another that we hadn’t anticipated. It also entails the possibility of finding out new things about ourselves, for we might be surprised about how we perceive one another from an ever-changing perspective.
September 5, 2024 at 6:19 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Heavenbanning is the latest torment nexus to have been built, I guess
A tweet from @nearcyan. Tweet is, in its entirety: "heavenbanning, the hypothetical practice of banishing a user from a platform by causing everyone that they speak with to be replaced by Al models that constantly agree and praise them, but only from their own perspective, is entirely feasible with the current state of Al/LLMs" There is a fake New York Times article embedded in the original tweet, headlined "Reddit's new 'Heaven Banning' pilocy proces controversial". Its body text will be in the next image. Reddit's new method of dealing with trolls has proven highly effective. However, some think it poses grave ethical questions. Since discovering he was heaven banned, Reddit user Albert Tallan had this to say, "I thought these bots were my friends; I shared my life with them. I feel so manipulated. A whole month of my online life was an elaborate fiction." When Albert Tallan lost his job last spring, he took his frustrations out in various subreddits. At first, his comments were not well received. He was called a troll and mocked for the frequent solecisms in his prose. But slowly things seemed to change. Mocking transitioned to fulsome praise. From his perspective, it seemed he was becoming a pillar of various subreddits he visited. In reality, his comments were invisible to all users besides himself. Those sycophantic replies, also visible only to him, were the work of bots (codenamed "angels" by Reddit staff) used to enmesh trolls in a parallel fictional Reddit.
August 22, 2024 at 9:55 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Vegas bookies put money on who shot Mr. Burns, which was a cliffhanger from the Golden Era of The Simpsons. (If these odds were accurate, you could get a free 70x return on your investment by betting on Maggie.)
A board from The Mirage showing the odds of "who shot Mr. Burns?" Said odds: Homer Simpson, 2/1 Waylon Smithers, 5/2 Krusty the Clown, 3/1 Bart Simpson, 4/1 Barney Gumbel [sic, should be "Gumble"], 5/1 Hans Moleman, 7/1 Moe the Bartender (they gave him a last name in this episode so the clues would point to him!), 8/1 Abraham "Grampa" Simpson, 10/1 Mayor "Diamond Joe" Quimby, 12/1 Apu Nahasapeemspetilan [sic, should be "Nahasapeemapetilon"]: 15/1 Lisa Simpson: 20/1 "Snake" (AKA Jailbird): 25/1 Principal Seymour Skinner: 30/1 Sideshow Mel: 40/1 Groundskeeper Willie: 40/1 The Old Sea Captain: 50/1 Nelson Muntz: 60/1 Maggie Simpson: 70/1 There's at least one more entry (Mrs. Edna Krabappel [sic, she is famously not married]), but it's cut off at the bottom.
August 17, 2024 at 12:41 AM
affinity.bsky.social
Post a non-religious picture you think of as holy.
The final frame of an installment of the now-defunct webcomic Minus. A small girl in a blue skirt stands on top of a mountain, staring down a meteor hurtling towards the earth. She has a baseball bat.
August 16, 2024 at 1:15 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Unlike you, I get my news from a reliable source.
Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting. A white man with short, dark hair in a brown jacket over a blue plaid shirt stands up in a crowd, putting both hands on the wood bench in front of him. He holds his chin high and is mid-speech, looking out and to the left. A crowd of onlookers mostly look at him, notably another white man with dark hair in a grey suit, white dress shirt, and black tie, sitting in front of him and leaning back to look up at him, and an older white man with grey hair and a black suit sitting next to him. In the speaking man's pocket and in the second man's hand is a report of some kind on blue paper, and the older man has it bunched up in his hand as if considering striking the speaking man.
August 9, 2024 at 4:23 AM
affinity.bsky.social
Share your lock screen:

I have an iOS shortcut that rotates the wallpaper through Control photos my partner took. It's currently this.
A photo of my lock screen. A large alien with no visible limbs looms over a platform in a dim grey fog, its lone eye casting a searchlight in front of the camera. Overlaid near the top of the frame is a calendar listing, the time in large font, and four weather widgets. (It's 22C, 83% humidity, with an AQI rating of 2 and a cloud ceiling of 900m.)
August 8, 2024 at 3:49 PM
affinity.bsky.social
I'm being very clear. Her pronouns are she/her. You switched pronoun sets but not to she/her. That is as much a mistake as using he/him. I took the liberty of underlining the posts in question.

You can't edit the posts. You could delete them. But you can always start doing the right thing now.
August 4, 2024 at 12:42 AM
affinity.bsky.social
Post the television character you most identify with.

You said people come here to change the story of their lives. I imagined a story where I didn't have to be the damsel."
Dolores Abernathy, from Westworld. Here she wears a pinstriped button-up shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and is pointing a revolver off-camera.
August 1, 2024 at 6:25 PM
affinity.bsky.social
This one, however. twitter.com/dril/status/...
A dril tweet from 2018. It reads in its entirety: i Fucking hate it when i come at the king and miss, especially when I best not do that
July 14, 2024 at 5:32 PM
affinity.bsky.social
A line from The Simpsons that describes your sex life:
A screenshot from The Secret War of Lisa Simpson. Military cadet Lisa and Bart are having a conversation in private, and Bart, who has been staring at his shoes the whole time, keeps using footwear-based analogies. His latest is "Like a sock-maker secretly working on a top secret sock--" and Lisa cuts him off with "Will you stop looking at your feet?"
July 6, 2024 at 6:28 PM
affinity.bsky.social
The only debate that really matters.
An older white man in a black suit and burgundy tie, sitting at a dark-coloured table. A blurred nameplate sits before him. Microphones are pointed on either side towards two other people, mostly out of frame. The man has both arms on the table, gripping a pencil like he's about to snap it, looking murderously across at the viewer. An older man in a grey suit and periwinkle tie. He is sitting at a similar table as the other man. Two microphones are pointed at him on either side of the frame, and he has both arms resting comfortably on the table. He looks back across the table, calmer but still notably annoyed. (This and the previous man are the two main characters from Run the Jewels' music video for "Nobody Speak".)
June 30, 2024 at 4:46 PM
affinity.bsky.social
This among other things is a big reason why I've internalized xkcd's "Ten Thousand" comic: xkcd.com/1053/ I really, really like encouraging curiosity, even -- maybe especially -- if it's for important things that people are actively discouraged or structurally disincentivized
from learning about.
A two-panel xkcd comic. The first panel has a floating caption above it that begins: "I try not to make fun of people for admitting that they don't know things." A box below continues: "Because for each thing "everyone knows" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time." The math follows: Fraction who have had it at birth = 0%. Fraction who have heard of it by 30 ~= 100%. US birth rate ~= 4,000,000/year. Number hearing about it for the first time ~= 10,000/day." The second panel has a similar floating caption box: "If I make fun of people, I train them not to tell me when they have those moments. And I miss out on the fun." The panel itself is a stick figure with shoulder-length black hair telling a cueball stick figure, "'Diet coke and mentos thing'? What's that?" Cueball responds, "On man! Come on, we're going to the grocery store." Black-haired figure: "Why?" Cueball: "You're one of today's lucky 10,000."
June 20, 2024 at 12:26 AM
affinity.bsky.social
The other week I saw a meme that used the demotivational poster format as a skeuomorph. Like, it wasn't in the content format of a demotivational poster -- it was just a caption, not a theme word plus a slogan -- but it used the black border with white trim and white serif font.
A meme drawn by Nyxie on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TateOfTot/status/1752573021468921920). A bust sketch of Izutsumi, from Dungeon meshi, looking directly at the viewer. She is a dark-haired, pale-skinned catgirl with one white-tipped ear and mustard-yellow feline eyes. She wears a large red scarf and a brown sleeveless top. This picture is surrounded on three sides by a wide black border with white trim near the picture. Underneath, in demotivational poster style, is the phrase "I have hired this cat to stare at you".
June 14, 2024 at 6:34 PM
affinity.bsky.social
@rifka.bsky.social alt4you
A four-panel comic. Panel 1: A pale-skinned man holds a large purple sci-fi gun with a matching monocular wearable. He says: "Hey, check it out! Look what I got." In the foreground, a slightly less pale woman with glasses replies, "Oh, no! Not you too... those things are so evil." Panel 2: A reverse shot of panel 1. The man says "Oh, I didn't realize you were one of those people who are *afraid of all new technology*." The woman holds her arms out and replies "It was made to harvest *human skin!*" Panel 3: A closeup of the man putting an apple near the business end of the gun with a tongue-out look of concentration. He says "You're not even considering all the *good applications* of it! For instance: I can put an apple right here, and..." Panel 4: The woman recoils. Around her are three items of meaning: a speech bubble robotically declaring "human skin detected"; a speech bubble yelling "*Yeowww! all my skin!!!!*"; and a ribbon of skin with a drop of blood flying off the torn end.
June 11, 2024 at 8:32 PM
affinity.bsky.social
@pluplubasch.bsky.social alt4you
A CBPP analysis of SPM data from Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy (before 2009) and US Census Bureau (2009 and later). Figures use Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and 2022 poverty line adjusted for inflation. The graph shows a long line of the percentage point difference in child poverty year-over-year (negative numbers are good). At the beginning in 1969, there are several -2% years and one +2% year. Starting in 1981 there's a three-year streak of +2% years, and then in '85, several -1% years. In 1994 there's one +2% year and then several straight years of decent reductions, starting with over -2% in 1994 and -1 and -2% years through 2001. There wasn't much movement after that in either direction until 2016, where there were significant reductions again: several years approached -2%, and 2020 and 2021 saw the largest drops on the chart, at roughly -3.5 and -4.5% each. Then in 2022, there's a +7.0% increase, far and away the largest increase on the chart.
June 11, 2024 at 8:15 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Assigned buny at birth 🥰
An altered screenshot from Pokémon of a Scorbunny at a whiteboard, holding a pointer stick and self-assuredly expressing "im buny".
June 9, 2024 at 5:18 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Not if you take the narrowest possible reading. If you take a reasonable reading, however, she's saying that either the Democratic government currently in power should do what the far right wants, or the far right should be in power. (The forced birth movement has always been far-right.)
A crop of the link card of the Atlantic article. It says: www.theatlantic.com Make Birth Free It's time the pro-life movement chose life.
June 9, 2024 at 3:51 PM
affinity.bsky.social
An excerpt from the above Atlantic article. It reads: "The federal government could—without much structural innovation—eliminate these costs altogether, and with them lethal barriers to maternal and infant care. Medicare already covers the costs of pregnancy and childbirth for people who are eligible for the program due to disability. This coverage could be extended to everyone, regardless of disability status, age, income, or work history—and such an expansion should be feasible, at least administratively."
June 9, 2024 at 3:01 PM
affinity.bsky.social
I'm vaguely aware that she's disliked, though I didn't particularly pay attention because I tend not to read columnists. However, I do know how to do research and try not to assume other people are going to do it for me. I felt generous. Here.
An excerpt of https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/elizabeth-breunig: "Bruenig is a convert to Catholicism, and in her earlier writings she opposed abortion rights, defended the Catholic Church's sexist policies, like its opposition to birth control and female priests, and she sympathetically reviewed a book that counseled Catholic gays and lesbians to practice celibacy. However, those pieces were published years ago, and today she is far more tight-lipped about her socially conservative beliefs. Surely, that's because Bruenig realizes that if she now were to write openly about, say, abortion, she'd damage her brand and lose her leftist cool-kid cred."
June 9, 2024 at 1:04 AM
affinity.bsky.social
@rifka.bsky.social alt4you, plus I sourced the screenshot to www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_vZ...
A screenshot of the linked youtube video, showing a sign outside the Artificial Island nuclear power plant in New Jersey. It's on tall rusted metal supports on the side of a road in a residential area. It has a yellow title bar with the radiation symbol and "Emergency Siren", and a white body with "If siren sounds for 3 to 5 minutes tune radio to 97.3 FM".
June 9, 2024 at 12:51 AM
affinity.bsky.social
WHAT THE FUCK, THIS IS LITERALLY TRUE

(Okay, it was my fault, I was five, we had an enclosed porch and I was climbing over the railing to fetch a ball that I was playing with that had sailed over the railing, and I slipped and fell. I still have the scar. BUT STILL)
A screenshot from https://perchance.org/character-headcanon-generator-by-outergirlsound generating a 'headcanon' of the name Affinity: "Affinity was dropped out of a window as a child."
June 5, 2024 at 4:41 PM
affinity.bsky.social
@jucifer.bsky.social Alt text is in the reposted image!
A screenshot of the New York Times internal search engine. The search query is "transgender", which has 9,939 results for. There's a newsletter being advertised called "Gender & Society": "News on gender, women and society from the New York Times." underneath is a post (comments have called this headline misleading, as it links to a fact check of the quote within that headline) titled "'Transgenderism, especially in kids, is a mental health disorder.'" by Azeen Ghoyrashi.
June 3, 2024 at 11:26 PM