Hey all, while we’re busy normalizing women with hairy legs, hairy armpits and bushy pubes, let’s also normalize women with hairy upper lips, hairy chins, hairy side burns, hairy chests, and all the other places where women are supposedly magically hair-free.
just saw someone say 5 year olds can’t read and it had thousands of likes
i always thought i was just biased because my mom “home schooled” me for pre-k so i went into public school already knowing how to read, write, basic phonics and spelling, basic addition and subtraction, etc. i have such a vivid memory of sitting on the carpet during my first week of school wondering why our teacher was going over the alphabet and which sounds the letters make. don’t we already know the alphabet? i got frustrated doing what everyone else was doing until the 1st grade teachers agreed to pull me out during reading and math time to join them instead.
but you’re supposed to do that. my mom was actually right in doing that and not saddling some poor teacher with a kid who doesn’t even know their own full name or how to hold a pencil, let alone WRITE their name correctly. i didn’t realize it was that bad. i feel like if not just sheer laziness and handing their kid a tablet, parents forget kids don’t come out of the womb being able to figure these things out on their own. reading and writing is not instinctual and they don’t learn just waddling around with a sticky ipad in their hands playing cocomelon on repeat. any delay in learning these skills can lead to major deficits down the road if not immediately corrected. it’s why there were kids in high school who were functionally illiterate with no developmental delays or cognitive issues
“how could someone cheat on megan thee stallion” is obviously an understandable reaction to have but unfortunately we should all probably check ourselves on that, because the logic behind that thought is “men cheat because their girlfriends aren’t cool/hot/young/famous/sexually skilled enough, and megan thee stallion is all of those things, so she shouldn’t have been cheated on!” which i don’t think any of us actually believe. in our heart of hearts we all know that megan thee stallion getting cheating on had nothing to do with her being megan thee stallion and everything to do with that man being trash
3weeks4dreamwidth '26 has a friending meme. If you're not familiar with these, what folks do is: (1) use a provided template to post about themselves, their DW journal, and what kind of DW journals they'd like to interact with, and/or (2) look through the posts and find journals to subscribe to. Some people ask permission and/or issue an invitation in the friending meme thread before subscribing; some don't; there's no prescribed etiquette.
I posted here. I've opened a handful of journals to look at, and also learned an alternate fannish acronym to search on, in case I'd previously missed journals with that as an interest.
This meme's template ends in a "Currently" section that I thought I'd share with you here:
Reading: This is my year of re-reading Stout's "Nero Wolfe" mysteries (last year was re-reading Bujold's "World of the Five Gods"), but I just started Girl Waits With Gun (2015) by Amy Stewart, and I recently finished Ramona (1884) by Helen Hunt Jackson. I'm following the Thundarr the Barbarian comic.
Watching:Babylon 5 (first time through), Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Daredevil: Born Again, Call the Midwife, Bookish, All Creatures Great and Small, Secrets of the Dead...
Playing: I'm about a hundred hours into Skyward Sword, with nothing left to do but face the endgame (or continue beating my head against the boss rush and minigames, which I do not enjoy; I play for the story and sidequests, first of all, then for the exploration, then puzzles, and last of all for boss fights, never for minigames or rushes). Up next, I'm deciding between Tears of the Kingdom and The Minish Cap... unless enough time has passed to play Echoes of Wisdom again already?
Looking forward to: Many of the movies coming to the big screen later this year! Fingers crossed. (Be good, be good, be good.) The Odyssey, Supergirl, Spider-man: Brand New Day, Avengers: Doomsday, The Death of Robin Hood, Masters of the Universe, The Legend of Aang...
The fabulous rosanicus has been investigating the long-lost 1960s Biggles TV series, of which up till now we have only had one very bad episode on Youtube featuring a toy boat sinking. But now Rosie has discovered more, embedded in a collection of clips from old tv: a six minute clip of Bertie making good use of the NATO phonetic alphabet, and Biggles trying to work out how to behave in a pub (Biggles starts at 33.59). Also Rosie found the summaries of all the episodes and put them together in a single document, so now we know what it was about, approximately speaking. Don't miss 'Follows On Up The Amazon', or the grand finale which features Biggles and von Stalhein trapped together in a collapsing Egyptian tomb.... you can see all the details at rosanicus's post here. If Rosie's efforts come to something we might get to be able to watch more of the show one day soon, but in the meantime I feel like the episode summaries would make fantastic fic prompts.
And as well as all that, we have also finally solved a fannish mystery, which is probably interesting to about six people in the world but I'm one of them. Judging by the episode descriptions, it's clear that in the TV series continuity Buries a Hatchet hasn't happened and von Stalhein continues to be a villain-for-hire and Biggles's nemesis, and - since all villains need a sidekick - he has a sidekick named Laxter.
Now, some while back I posted about the mystery of Laxter, who is mentioned as von Stalhein's sidekick in a short story in Biggles Flies To Work, but doesn't appear anywhere else in connection with von Stalhein, and I had no idea where he had come from or why, or why von Stalhein was suddenly evil again in a story well after Buries a Hatchet.
But now it's obvious. He's from the TV series. The TV series is 1960, Flies To Work is 1961. So the best explanation for the sudden appearance both of Erich as a villain again and with Laxter as his sidekick is that Flies To Work is in TV continuity, and not the main book canon continuity.
And while von Stalhein does not appear in any of the currently extant TV, the detective efforts of the WEJ discord have produced a few photos of Carl Duering in that role, which are below the cut.
We admired an early-1970s GMC van in a California car graveyard last week, and now I'm following that up with an early-1970s Dodge van in a Nevada car graveyard. Will we see a Ford Econoline in Utah next week? It's possible!
Chrysler built the Dodge/Fargo A100 series of forward-control vans from the 1964 through 1970 model years, and final-year examples are very hard to find in junkyards. This one currently resides in a boneyard near Sparks, Nevada.
That means I have photographed and written articles about all the discarded A100s I could find since 2007, including the '66 Tradesman above, a '67 Sportsman, a '67 camper, a '68 Sportsman, and a '69 Sportsman (yeah, Chrysler didn't always use the Tradesman and Sportsman names on the A100, but I'm applying them anyway).
For the 1967-1970 model years, Chrysler built a long-wheelbase version of the A100, and that's what we have here.
The regular A100 had a 90-inch wheelbase (yes, that's shorter than the wheelbase of the MGB), while the stretched version had a 108-inch wheelbase (about the same as that of the first-generation Chevrolet Camaro). Chrysler badged these vans as A108s; you can see the shadow of the A108 emblem in this photograph.
The impressive thing about the A100 was its impressive load capacity for such a small footprint. It rode on solid axles and leaf springs, front and rear, which meant you could carry a hefty load of cargo and/or passengers. But it also burdened drivers with a jouncy, porpoising ride that got terrifying at highway speeds, especially once the kingpins wore out.
By the time I sold it, my A100 had a good 318 bolted to a freshly rebuilt TorqueFlite, plus better-than-new brakes and suspension (with nice new kingpins and bushings), and it still sucked to drive at any speed above about 45 mph. That's why I sold it. Last I heard, it lives in Canada.
Total A100 sales were just over 100,000 units, which was enough to ensure that these vans were a common sight on American roads as late as the early 1990s. I shot this one (and the Econoline next to it) in the parking lot of the now-defunct Hayward Pick Your Part in 1991.
For the 1971 model year, Chrysler (and GM) followed Ford's lead and redesigned their vans to be bigger, with independent front suspensions and the engines moved forward. Chrysler's design proved so successful that those Dodge (and, for a few years, Plymouth) B-Series vans were built all the way through either 1997 or 2003 (depending on where you draw the line between "facelift" and "new design").
When I ran across this van, there was a guy measuring the rear axle assembly to see if it would fit his 1967 Barracuda. He was kind enough to get out of the way for these photos.
The engine is some flavor of two-barrel LA-series Chrysler V8, which would be a 318 if original. Most of these vans came with Slant-6 power, partly because the V8's exhaust manifolds were such a tight fit against the engine doghouse that the front-seat occupants courted serious leg burns.
The base three-on-the-tree manual was the most popular transmission in the A100, but the original purchaser of this van opted for the three-speed automatic with the cool-looking one-armed-bandit-style dash shifter.
The 1968-1970 US-market A100s had side marker lights, thanks to federal safety regulations (cars got them a year earlier).
It's rough, but there are still plenty of nearly-impossible-to-find parts on it.
A 22-year-old medical student from India created an AI-generated MAGA girl influencer to rake in thousands of dollars from U.S. men by way of millions of social media views, softcore AI-generated content subscriptions and selling anti-woke apparel, according to a new report.
The tech outlet WIRED interviewed the Indian man about his creation, registered nurse “Emily Hart,” whom the pseudonymous Sam described as “pro-Christian, pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-woke, and anti-immigration.” The fake influencer would post selfies of herself in a bikini, or doing activities like firing guns, ice fishing and drinking Coors Light.
The whole story sounds made up, except it probably wasn't:
“Every Reel I posted was getting 3 million views, 5 million views, 10 million views. The algorithm loved it.” he claims. Within a month, Emily Hart had more than 10,000 Instagram followers, many of whom also subscribed to her softcore AI-generated content on the OnlyFans competitor Fanvue. And between Fanvue subscriptions and selling MAGA-themed T-shirts (one sample message reads ”PTSD: Pretty Tired of Stupid Democrats”), Sam estimates he was making a few thousand dollars a month.
I wonder what Rawan would do if her paid contract with the state of Israel was terminated, if she found out that her genetic test was bungled and in fact she has negligible Jewish ancestry, if Israel were to clamp down on liberalism, feminism and immigrants (like we've seen elsewhere) and/or if her conscience would eventually catch up with her.
The Organization for Transformative Works's April Membership Drive is over and we are delighted to say that we are finishing with a total of $362,171.85 raised, far exceeding our goal of US$150,000. These donations came from 9,702 people in 87 countries: thank you to every single one of them, as well as to all of you who posted and shared the news about the drive!
We are particularly pleased that 8,035 donors chose to take up or renew an OTW membership with their donation. The OTW would not exist without its users all around the world, and your continued support for us is our absolute pride and joy! We are so glad to know that our ongoing mission to support, protect, and provide access to the history of fanworks and fan culture continues to resonate with the people that matter most of all: the fans themselves.
If you were intending to donate or join and haven't yet done so, don't worry! The OTW accepts donations all year and you can always choose to become a member with a donation of US$10 or more. Memberships run for one calendar year from the date of your donation, so if you donate now you'll be able to vote in the 2026 OTW Board elections, which will take place in August. And our exclusive thank-you gifts are available whenever you donate!
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
Dreamwidth Shockwave Flash embed #117. I'm the only creature on Dreamwidth who uses a Flash embed for YT videos. Each embedded Flash video gets a site-specific ID number. Flash is the only way I know to get embedded YouTube videos to play without Javascript or Cookies. It's "legacy" code for both YouTube and Dreamwidth that allows old scripts from The Early Days to continue to work. YouTube does not give you Flash code anymore, I MacGyver in the YouTube ID string from the URL to make it work.
That's episode one of eight. I think there is only one more episode to go before this series is complete. The Amazing Digital Circus is from the Australian animation studio "Glitch" and is well worth watching. It's about a bunch of people trapped in a virtual environment as whimsical avatars subjected to a gameshow host type entity. They have no way to get out and no memories of how they got there or what their names are. Each episode is about 25 minutes long.
Eleanor, this place is just sand! It cannot love you back! You know this. You must know this. I will never, ever leave you. I love you. Come with me. The boat is waiting. We can be free of this place. We can have a life together. And it can start this very minute. All you have to do is say yes. Set us both free. — black sails ii
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3weeks4dreamwidth '26 has a friending meme. If you're not familiar with these, what folks do is: (1) use a provided template to post about themselves, their DW journal, and what kind of DW journals they'd like to interact with, and/or (2) look through the posts and find journals to subscribe to. Some people ask permission and/or issue an invitation in the friending meme thread before subscribing; some don't; there's no prescribed etiquette.
