Mood: Melted. There is no other word for it. There is a practiced but familiar rhythm to my life that usually only I can hear. It is the rapid-fire _thwip-thwip-click_ of a screen reader, the frantic, synthetic heartbeat of my phone as I navigate the world at five hundred words per minute. To anyone else, it sounds like a droid having a panic attack. To me, it is just the sound of access. I know this rhythm so intimately that when someone is using a screen reader for the first time, desktop or mobile, it’s a kind of signal before I even say hello. Usually, when a sighted person wants to help me with my phone, when an app updates and breaks its own accessibility labels, turning a useful tool into a minefield of "Button, Button, Unlabeled Button"—they take away the thing they don't know how to use. It usually happens like this. They sigh, they take the device from my hand, and they then silence the voice, reverting to the world of the sighted. Of course, they fix the problem with their eyes before handing it back. I am grateful for their help, certainly. But it is also a reminder that I live in a world that requires a translation layer they can simply peel away when it becomes inconvenient for them. Them turning off the screen reader reminds me that my world is something they'd rather get rid of, rather than ask me how to use the device with the screen reader enabled. But there are those people that stun and amaze me. Not for what they say, but what they choose to do. Tonight, I witnessed something that gave the word, love, a new dimension. I was sitting on his couch, half-listening to a podcast, when I heard the distinct, robotic cadence of VoiceOver coming from the other end of the cushion. But it wasn't my phone chattering, and the rhythm was wrong. It wasn't the lightning-fast blur I use. It was slow. Deliberate. And extremely clumsy. _Swipe. Pause. Swipe. Pause. Double-tap... silence._ Then, the frustrated, rumbling baritone of his voice, muttering a soft curse. "“The hell is that gesture again? You finna be thrown ‘cross the room if you don't behave.” I froze. Anthony, a gay Black man I recently met, only had a passing interest in my world. He’d ask questions. I’d answer them. he seemed to be content never going beyond what I provided. this was unexpected and earth shattering. I shifted, sliding my hand across the plushness of the couch until my fingers brushed his knee. He was tense, his leg muscle rigid. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Trying to order that Pizza," he grumbled. "The app updated. You said you couldn't find the checkout button yesterday." "I know," I said. "But usually you just... look at it." "Yeah, I'm not looking at it," he said, and I could hear the stubborn set of his jaw in his tone. "I turned the screen curtain on." My chest did a strange, tight flip. Screen curtain is a feature that turns the display off entirely for privacy, forcing you to rely 100% on the audio. He was simulating blindness and not for a few minutes, only to be grateful he never has to be trapped in my world again. Anthony, who's moderately tech savvy, willingly plunged himself into my world. Given his tense muscles and tight voice, he’d been at this for a while. Nobody ever does this for their own understanding, at least, not in my universe. Still, I had to ask. "Why?" He paused. I heard his thumb drag across the glass again. _“Unlabeled button,”_ the synth voice deadpanned. "Because you were frustrated," he said, his voice sincere and vibrating with that chest-deep resonance that always grounds me. "You were frustrated yesterday, and I told you it was 'easy,' and you got quiet. I realized... I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't know what you was goin' through every day. I wanted to feel what you feel when something ain't accessible." He tapped the glass again. _Thump-thump._ A hollow sound. The gesture didn't take. "How do you do the... the thing to go back?" he asked, sounding defeated. "I'm doing the Z-scrub gesture but my fingers are too big." I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. Nobody ever did this long enough to understand. Here Anthony was, asking me how to navigate in my world instead of going back into his familiar sighted world. I reached out, covering his large, warm hand with mine. I could feel the heat of his frustration, the tension in his fingers as they hovered over the glass. He was struggling. He was failing. He was experiencing the exact, maddening friction that defines so much of my digital life. And it was the most romantic thing I have ever witnessed. He wasn't trying to save me. He wasn't trying to be the hero who fixes the broken thing. He was trying to _be_ with me in the brokenness. He wanted the empathy of shared frustration. He wanted to understand why I was tired, not just that I was tired. "It's a two-finger scrub," I whispered, my voice emotional. "Like you're scratching a lottery ticket." He tried it. _Scrub-scrub._ _“Back,”_ the phone announced. "Got it," he breathed, and the relief in his voice was pure triumph. I leaned my head against his shoulder, listening to the slow, stumbling rhythm of his fingers learning my language. It sounded like a child learning piano. It was the best sound in the world. He never did find the checkout button. We ended up calling the restaurant. But as he sat there, struggling with a piece of glass in the dark, refusing to open his eyes to the easy way out, I realized that he hadn't just learned a gesture. He had learned me. And that's what real love is all about. If you enjoyed this show of care, you might like Daydream by Hannah Grace

LAION-5B is an open-source foundation dataset. It contains 5.8 billion image and text pairs—a size too large to make sense of. We follow the construction of the dataset to better understand its contents, implications and entanglements.

Millions of _Large-Language-Model_ -generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this **gilded-age of software development**. We now have agents to plan how code will be written, agents to write code, agents to review code, agents to orchestrate and dispatch tasks to other more (or less) capable subagents (these heavily subsidized tokens aren’t going to pay for themselves). I’ve been in this game long enough to recognize tooling improvements from software companies at the bleeding edge of technique and application and it usually goes something like this: “If we make it easier for developers to create software, they will have more bandwidth to produce higher quality software!” I’m always left wondering (suspecting the answer with hopeful optimism that my hunch is wrong this time): do these workflow improvements actually improve how people (technical or otherwise) _experience_ software? Certainly **we have more software**. But is it better? I don’t know. Front-end web developers have lived through a few cycles of this (seven or eight years of client rendering, fifteen years of the _single-page-application_ -era smokescreen are a few that come to mind), sold as though improvements to developer experience would cause the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan himself to ask you for commit access to ship trickle-down improvements to user experience. Is this cycle repeating the same playbook (on a more accelerated pace)? Certainly we’ve seen numerous recent anecdotal examples of software becoming _less_ reliable over time (GitHub is the most recent scapegoat I’ve seen, but on my read they seem to be a second-order victim more than anything). _(Seems like a great time to be in the Monitoring/Status Page business)_ With these seismic changes, I will continue to make the argument that craft defined as **caring about the quality of output** (independent of the tools used to generate the output) is **more important than ever**. Caring about what you ship will always have **real-world value** to ~~visitors/consumers/users~~ **real people**. _Prefers-reduced-motion respecting web performance filmstrips fromthe AI category on Speedlify, a category boasting a failing median Core Web Vitals score with 12 out of 13 sites failing Lighthouse performance and Axe accessibility checks._

Have you ever wanted a simple website to publish your details and showcase your research? Good news! Z-Profile is a new tool aimed at helping researchers create their own sites, manage their online identity, and share their publications. View the Z-Profile demo site Z-Profile gets data from a specially-prepared Zotero collection, does of bit of processing, then generates a static website using Zola. The site includes biographical details and a list of your publications. Once your site is built, you can publish it using any web host, or for free through GitHub Pages. There’s a documentation site with full details, but creating your own Z-Profile site can be as simple as: 1. create a Zotero collection containing your publications and biographical details 2. go to the Z-Profile Site Builder and log on with Zotero – your site will be automatically built and packaged in a zip file 3. upload the contents of the zip file to the web host of your choice ## Why did I create Z-Profile? I was thinking about updating the guide to open access publishing for Australian historians that I created several years ago, and got a bit sidetracked… The problem was explaining the green open access (sometimes called self-archiving) provisions in publisher agreements that enable you to share certain versions of your publications. It’s fairly common for publishers to allow you to share the author accepted manuscript version (AAM) of your publication _immediately_ (ie without any embargo) on your ‘personal website’. Obviously I wanted to say – ‘just do it’. Put your AAM on the web and tell everyone where to find it. But it’s never that simple. The definition of a ‘personal website’ is fuzzy, perhaps intentionally, adding to the uncertainty around what’s permitted. And anyway, how many humanities researchers have the time, energy, and knowledge to create and maintain their own website? If I was going to encourage people to take advantage of this opportunity, I felt like I also needed to provide them with tools to make it easier. I also think it’s important for researchers to have online profiles that are not wholly dependent on their employer or a company that wants to exploit their data – to have ‘a domain of their own’ (in the words of the excellent folks at Reclaim Hosting). Of course, there are some other great options for building a research profile – in particular, I’d strongly suggest you set yourself up on Knowledge Commons. But having your own site, under your own domain, gives you extra control and flexibility. And so… Z-Profile. ## What is Z-Profile good for? Z-Profile is deliberately minimalist in design and function. It’s intended for people who want to share their research, but aren’t really interested in building websites. If you want more features, or more control, there are plenty of other tools around that could do the job. The Z-Profile home page displays your biographical details. You can include: * a portrait photo * a downloadable CV * a brief biographical note (that can include links to other sites) * a list of social media accounts or website links * a list of selected publications All the publications in your Zotero collection are automatically listed on a publications page. This is linked to an individual page for each publication, providing additional details, and links to alternative versions. Example of a publication page with the embedded PDF of an AAM version For example, perhaps you’ve just published an exhibition review in _Australian Historical Studies_ and want to share it online. Reviews aren’t covered by the ‘transformative agreements’ negotiated between Australian universities and Taylor & Francis (the journal’s publisher) that support open access publishing. However, under the publisher’s ‘self-archiving’ policy ‘you can post your Accepted Manuscript (AM) on your personal website at any point after publication of your article’. To share your review using Z-Profile, you’d just: * use Zotero to capture the publication details from the journal website * attach a PDF of your AAM to the item record in Zotero * tag the PDF with ‘aam’ to tell Z-Profile what it is Then, when you build your site with Z-Profile, it’ll create a page with the review, and embed the PDF for easy reading and download. ## What Z-Profile is not Z-Profile is not a repository. Even if you use it to share your publications, you should also upload your AAMs and preprints to an appropriate repository where they’ll be preserved and made available after any publisher-imposed embargoes. If you’re in a university, talk to the local librarians about your institutional repository. Otherwise there are general-purpose repositories like Knowledge Commons Works and Zenodo. You don’t have to limit yourself to a single option – remember LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe)! ## Some technical details Z-Profile is really just some templates and a bit of data plumbing. Here are the main components: * a Python script to get the data from Zotero and prepare the contents of your site for processing by Zola * some basic templates for Zola to convert the data to HTML * a Python Flask app that uses OAuth to request an API key from Zotero, then runs the Python script and the Zola build process * a GitHub template repository that contains the Python script, the Zola templates, and a workflow to run the build process in a GitHub Action * there’s also a discussion board in GitHub where you can ask questions or suggest improvements ## Please share! Obviously I think Z-Profile could be useful, otherwise I wouldn’t have been obsessing about it for the last few weeks. But I don’t really know until it’s out there in the world. So please let me know if you make use of it. I’m also aware that the sort of people who follow my stuff are likely to have the skills and confidence to build their own websites from scratch, without the need for something like Z-Profile. As ever, it’s hard to get information to the people who would benefit most. So please share Z-Profile with your less technically minded colleagues.

Mood: Melted. There is no other word for it. There is a practiced but familiar rhythm to my life that usually only I can hear. It is the rapid-fire _thwip-thwip-click_ of a screen reader, the frantic, synthetic heartbeat of my phone as I navigate the world at five hundred words per minute. To anyone else, it sounds like a droid having a panic attack. To me, it is just the sound of access. I know this rhythm so intimately that when someone is using a screen reader for the first time, desktop or mobile, it’s a kind of signal before I even say hello. Usually, when a sighted person wants to help me with my phone, when an app updates and breaks its own accessibility labels, turning a useful tool into a minefield of "Button, Button, Unlabeled Button"—they take away the thing they don't know how to use. It usually happens like this. They sigh, they take the device from my hand, and they then silence the voice, reverting to the world of the sighted. Of course, they fix the problem with their eyes before handing it back. I am grateful for their help, certainly. But it is also a reminder that I live in a world that requires a translation layer they can simply peel away when it becomes inconvenient for them. Them turning off the screen reader reminds me that my world is something they'd rather get rid of, rather than ask me how to use the device with the screen reader enabled. But there are those people that stun and amaze me. Not for what they say, but what they choose to do. Tonight, I witnessed something that gave the word, love, a new dimension. I was sitting on his couch, half-listening to a podcast, when I heard the distinct, robotic cadence of VoiceOver coming from the other end of the cushion. But it wasn't my phone chattering, and the rhythm was wrong. It wasn't the lightning-fast blur I use. It was slow. Deliberate. And extremely clumsy. _Swipe. Pause. Swipe. Pause. Double-tap... silence._ Then, the frustrated, rumbling baritone of his voice, muttering a soft curse. "“The hell is that gesture again? You finna be thrown ‘cross the room if you don't behave.” I froze. Anthony, a gay Black man I recently met, only had a passing interest in my world. He’d ask questions. I’d answer them. he seemed to be content never going beyond what I provided. this was unexpected and earth shattering. I shifted, sliding my hand across the plushness of the couch until my fingers brushed his knee. He was tense, his leg muscle rigid. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Trying to order that Pizza," he grumbled. "The app updated. You said you couldn't find the checkout button yesterday." "I know," I said. "But usually you just... look at it." "Yeah, I'm not looking at it," he said, and I could hear the stubborn set of his jaw in his tone. "I turned the screen curtain on." My chest did a strange, tight flip. Screen curtain is a feature that turns the display off entirely for privacy, forcing you to rely 100% on the audio. He was simulating blindness and not for a few minutes, only to be grateful he never has to be trapped in my world again. Anthony, who's moderately tech savvy, willingly plunged himself into my world. Given his tense muscles and tight voice, he’d been at this for a while. Nobody ever does this for their own understanding, at least, not in my universe. Still, I had to ask. "Why?" He paused. I heard his thumb drag across the glass again. _“Unlabeled button,”_ the synth voice deadpanned. "Because you were frustrated," he said, his voice sincere and vibrating with that chest-deep resonance that always grounds me. "You were frustrated yesterday, and I told you it was 'easy,' and you got quiet. I realized... I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't know what you was goin' through every day. I wanted to feel what you feel when something ain't accessible." He tapped the glass again. _Thump-thump._ A hollow sound. The gesture didn't take. "How do you do the... the thing to go back?" he asked, sounding defeated. "I'm doing the Z-scrub gesture but my fingers are too big." I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. Nobody ever did this long enough to understand. Here Anthony was, asking me how to navigate in my world instead of going back into his familiar sighted world. I reached out, covering his large, warm hand with mine. I could feel the heat of his frustration, the tension in his fingers as they hovered over the glass. He was struggling. He was failing. He was experiencing the exact, maddening friction that defines so much of my digital life. And it was the most romantic thing I have ever witnessed. He wasn't trying to save me. He wasn't trying to be the hero who fixes the broken thing. He was trying to _be_ with me in the brokenness. He wanted the empathy of shared frustration. He wanted to understand why I was tired, not just that I was tired. "It's a two-finger scrub," I whispered, my voice emotional. "Like you're scratching a lottery ticket." He tried it. _Scrub-scrub._ _“Back,”_ the phone announced. "Got it," he breathed, and the relief in his voice was pure triumph. I leaned my head against his shoulder, listening to the slow, stumbling rhythm of his fingers learning my language. It sounded like a child learning piano. It was the best sound in the world. He never did find the checkout button. We ended up calling the restaurant. But as he sat there, struggling with a piece of glass in the dark, refusing to open his eyes to the easy way out, I realized that he hadn't just learned a gesture. He had learned me. And that's what real love is all about. If you enjoyed this show of care, you might like Daydream by Hannah Grace

Mood: Melted. There is no other word for it. There is a practiced but familiar rhythm to my life that usually only I can hear. It is the rapid-fire _thwip-thwip-click_ of a screen reader, the frantic, synthetic heartbeat of my phone as I navigate the world at five hundred words per minute. To anyone else, it sounds like a droid having a panic attack. To me, it is just the sound of access. I know this rhythm so intimately that when someone is using a screen reader for the first time, desktop or mobile, it’s a kind of signal before I even say hello. Usually, when a sighted person wants to help me with my phone, when an app updates and breaks its own accessibility labels, turning a useful tool into a minefield of "Button, Button, Unlabeled Button"—they take away the thing they don't know how to use. It usually happens like this. They sigh, they take the device from my hand, and they then silence the voice, reverting to the world of the sighted. Of course, they fix the problem with their eyes before handing it back. I am grateful for their help, certainly. But it is also a reminder that I live in a world that requires a translation layer they can simply peel away when it becomes inconvenient for them. Them turning off the screen reader reminds me that my world is something they'd rather get rid of, rather than ask me how to use the device with the screen reader enabled. But there are those people that stun and amaze me. Not for what they say, but what they choose to do. Tonight, I witnessed something that gave the word, love, a new dimension. I was sitting on his couch, half-listening to a podcast, when I heard the distinct, robotic cadence of VoiceOver coming from the other end of the cushion. But it wasn't my phone chattering, and the rhythm was wrong. It wasn't the lightning-fast blur I use. It was slow. Deliberate. And extremely clumsy. _Swipe. Pause. Swipe. Pause. Double-tap... silence._ Then, the frustrated, rumbling baritone of his voice, muttering a soft curse. "“The hell is that gesture again? You finna be thrown ‘cross the room if you don't behave.” I froze. Anthony, a gay Black man I recently met, only had a passing interest in my world. He’d ask questions. I’d answer them. he seemed to be content never going beyond what I provided. this was unexpected and earth shattering. I shifted, sliding my hand across the plushness of the couch until my fingers brushed his knee. He was tense, his leg muscle rigid. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Trying to order that Pizza," he grumbled. "The app updated. You said you couldn't find the checkout button yesterday." "I know," I said. "But usually you just... look at it." "Yeah, I'm not looking at it," he said, and I could hear the stubborn set of his jaw in his tone. "I turned the screen curtain on." My chest did a strange, tight flip. Screen curtain is a feature that turns the display off entirely for privacy, forcing you to rely 100% on the audio. He was simulating blindness and not for a few minutes, only to be grateful he never has to be trapped in my world again. Anthony, who's moderately tech savvy, willingly plunged himself into my world. Given his tense muscles and tight voice, he’d been at this for a while. Nobody ever does this for their own understanding, at least, not in my universe. Still, I had to ask. "Why?" He paused. I heard his thumb drag across the glass again. _“Unlabeled button,”_ the synth voice deadpanned. "Because you were frustrated," he said, his voice sincere and vibrating with that chest-deep resonance that always grounds me. "You were frustrated yesterday, and I told you it was 'easy,' and you got quiet. I realized... I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't know what you was goin' through every day. I wanted to feel what you feel when something ain't accessible." He tapped the glass again. _Thump-thump._ A hollow sound. The gesture didn't take. "How do you do the... the thing to go back?" he asked, sounding defeated. "I'm doing the Z-scrub gesture but my fingers are too big." I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. Nobody ever did this long enough to understand. Here Anthony was, asking me how to navigate in my world instead of going back into his familiar sighted world. I reached out, covering his large, warm hand with mine. I could feel the heat of his frustration, the tension in his fingers as they hovered over the glass. He was struggling. He was failing. He was experiencing the exact, maddening friction that defines so much of my digital life. And it was the most romantic thing I have ever witnessed. He wasn't trying to save me. He wasn't trying to be the hero who fixes the broken thing. He was trying to _be_ with me in the brokenness. He wanted the empathy of shared frustration. He wanted to understand why I was tired, not just that I was tired. "It's a two-finger scrub," I whispered, my voice emotional. "Like you're scratching a lottery ticket." He tried it. _Scrub-scrub._ _“Back,”_ the phone announced. "Got it," he breathed, and the relief in his voice was pure triumph. I leaned my head against his shoulder, listening to the slow, stumbling rhythm of his fingers learning my language. It sounded like a child learning piano. It was the best sound in the world. He never did find the checkout button. We ended up calling the restaurant. But as he sat there, struggling with a piece of glass in the dark, refusing to open his eyes to the easy way out, I realized that he hadn't just learned a gesture. He had learned me. And that's what real love is all about. If you enjoyed this show of care, you might like Daydream by Hannah Grace

One add-on that decides whether search engines, AI crawlers, and everything else may crawl your archive, separate from who can read it.

Mood: Tired. Ranty. In need of a hunk of a man to bake me cookies so I can stress eat. There is a specific, suffocating hell to a conversation with a leftist who has decided that voting is a moral failing. It feels like trying to explain the concept of "drowning" to someone who is standing on dry land, criticizing the aesthetic quality of the life raft. They talk about "purity" and "burning it all down," and their voices have the smooth, frictionless quality of people who have never had their survival threatened by a change in bureaucratic font size. They tell me that nobody is progressive enough. They tell me the system is broken. I know. I feel the broken edges of this system against my skin every single day. I know the machinery is rusted and hostile because I am the one getting caught in the gears. But here is the difference between us: To them, voting is an identity. It is a mood board. It is a public statement of the soul. If the candidate doesn't align perfectly with their spirit, they withhold their vote like it’s a precious jewel that cannot be sullied. To me, voting is not an identity. It is a mechanic. It is a piece of duct tape. It is a shim. And I always, always use the shim. I do not talk to these people about strategy because they do not understand the difference between _morality_ and _logistics_. They think refusing to vote is a "statement." I think refusing to vote is a surrender. It is a way of telling me you are comfortable enough to survive fascism, so you don't mind letting it in the front door just to teach the Democrats a lesson. When you are disabled, when you are poor, "harm reduction" isn't a buzzword. It is the difference between a bruise and a broken bone. It is the difference between losing a program that feeds you and keeping it for one more agonizing, underfunded year. So, I vote. Local elections. National elections. School boards. Judges. I vote in every single one. I do the research. I listen to the candidates. I find the person who is the most progressive, or, frankly, the person who is the least likely to actively hunt my community for sport. I know they will never do everything I want. I know they are beholden to corporate donors. I know the Democratic party is a disappointment engine running on fumes and nostalgia. But I am not voting for a savior. I am voting for an opponent I can negotiate with. This is the part that the online purists miss. They view politics as a romance—they want to fall in love with a leader. I view politics as physics. I am looking for leverage. When I cast a ballot for a corporate Democrat over a fascist, I am not endorsing their soul. I am choosing the terrain of the battlefield. I am choosing to fight on a field where I might be ignored, rather than on a field where I will be liquidated. I vote to buy time. That’s it. That is the strategy. We need time to build community. We need time to establish mutual aid networks. We need time to organize, to feed each other, to build the structures that will actually save us. If a Republican wins, that time evaporates. The atmosphere changes. The pressure drops. The noise of survival becomes so deafening that we cannot hear each other to organize. We spend 100% of our energy just trying not to die, trying to protect our friends from deportation, from institutionalization, from violence. We stop building; we start hiding. A Democrat—even a mediocre, frustrating one—acts as a buffer. They are a doorstop. They keep the door cracked open just an inch, just enough for us to breathe, just enough for us to do the real work. I have a Republican acquaintance. We are not friends—the friction between our worldviews is too abrasive for friendship—but we talk. He likes me more than I like him, mostly because he thinks my disability makes me a tragedy he can be kind to. He told me something once, his voice heavy with a terrifying, calm confidence. He said, "I don't worry about Republicans losing. The leftists, the ones who really hate us? They don't vote. They stay home because they're mad at their own side. We count on that." He wasn't gloating. He was stating a fact of engineering. He knows the math. He knows that his side views voting as a weapon, while my side views voting as a valentine. As long as the left treats the ballot box like a purity test, the right will win by default. I hear the slogan constantly: _"If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal."_ It rings in my ears like a tinnitus of bad logic. Do you not hear the gears grinding? They _are_ trying to make it illegal. Every single day. They are closing polling places in Black neighborhoods. They are purging voter rolls. They are creating ID laws that specifically target the poor and the disabled. Why would they spend millions of dollars and decades of effort trying to stop you from doing something if it didn't matter? They are building walls around the ballot box because they know it is a point of failure for their power. They know that if we actually used the leverage we have, the machine would jam. When I vote, I am not "blindly checking a box." I am engaging in a quiet, boring, essential act of strategy and self-defense. I am using the system's own bureaucracy to clog its worst impulses. I am finding the person who will speak to—or at least not actively silence—my disability needs. I am looking for the candidate who acknowledges that the Americans with Disabilities Act exists, even if they don't fund it enough. Is it exhausting? God, yes. I am so tired. I am tired of choosing between "active malice" and "benevolent neglect." I am tired of the lesser of two evils. My muscles ache from holding the door open. But I do not have the luxury of fatigue. Voting is not the work. Voting is the chore we do so that we _can_ do the work. The real work is building the coalition. It is the mutual aid. It is feeding your neighbors. It is creating a community that is so tightly woven that we can catch each other when the state fails. But you cannot build that community effectively when you are constantly under siege. You cannot plant a garden during a bombing run. There will always be people who disappear when things get "easy." There are fairweather allies who only care about politics when it's trending, who engage in mutual aid for the aesthetic and then vanish when the crisis creates a little friction. But for those of us who stay? For those of us who know that "easy" is just a pause in the violence? We need every inch of ground we can get. We defend the people who stay. We defend the people who build. And we do that by being strategic, not morally righteous. I don't care if you feel "dirty" voting for a centrist. I don't care if it ruins your vibe. Wash your hands afterward. I care about strategy. I care about the fact that my healthcare, my housing, and my physical safety are on the line. If you refuse to vote because the candidate isn't perfect, you aren't a revolutionary. You are a roadblock. You are standing in the doorway, blocking the only exit, complaining about the paint color while the rest of us are choking on the smoke. Get out of the way. Or better yet—pick up a bucket and help us hold the line. If you enjoyed this rant, you might enjoy Yes No Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed.

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Buttondown is the last email platform you'll migrate to. We're focused on your success, not on bleeding you dry.

AI data centers are driving demand for memory chips, pushing phone makers to raise prices and abandon some of their most affordable models.

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Because I frequently receive so many questions, I'd figured I'd just make a FAQ page, and just add to this over time. But first, some links. # Links of note. Learn all about me and this blog. Learn how to reprint my work Contact me Tip me financially here or get me something from my wish list Find my podcast here. Buy my books and Find my other writing, all of my other writing, here. Read all my posts Find any other page on my site map, the easiest place to get around this website. # Frequently asked questions. Check back over time. Otherwise, visit the site map if you feel lost ## Why don't you reply to my emails in a timely manner? Because I'm disabled, and my mental health and my found family and my peace is vastly more important than a quick response to you. I will never be productive in a capitalistic way ever again. If you want to have a quick response, you won't get it. I'm going to take my time writing back to you. Because I never aspire to capitalistic standards again, I'm going to take my time to compose a thoughtful email over time. ## Will you join my chatroom/resistance chat/fan chat room? No. I won't keep up with the chat anyway and besides, you can always send me an email. Writing more than a few words is good for your mental health. ## Why don't you reply to me on Bluesky? Because your BlueSky account is not bridged into the Fediverse. I do not have a native account on BlueSky. My Fediverse account is bridged into the BlueSky social network. While the bridge does have some way of facilitating replies if you don't bridge your BlueSky account into the Fediverse, it's clunky and not worth the time nor effort to reply if you are not bridged. If you want to be sure I see your reply, bridge your account into the Fediverse before tagging or mentioning me. ## What's with cookies? Why are cookies in every aspect of your work? Because I love cookies, all kinds of cookies, even what other countries call cookies. Send me all the cookies in the world. ## What's with the face holding? Is that a blindness thing or a gay thing? Why is face holding such a thing in your fiction and nonfiction? Because I like it. It's my unique brand of safety. I love it when someone holds my face, and I want to feel safe and I want my characters to feel safe. It's not a blindness thing or a gay thing. It's a, me, thing. Call it the Kingett Trope! ## Why does your older work reference you looking at things? Because I was legally blind with some usable vision until my late twenties. I'm totally blind now, due to acute Narrow Angle Glaucoma. I've never been sighted. I don't know what it's like to live in a sighted world. I've always lived in the Blind world and I was brought up in Blind culture. ## Is your books or blog for younger readers? Typically, no. I don't write for kids. I don't write for young readers generally, so do not tell a kid about my blog writing or any of my books without reading both of them first. I write explicit sex scenes. I cuss. I write about triggering subjects. I never shy away from the hard experience life can sometimes toss at us and me. While I do think older kids and teenagers, young and old teenagers, should be exposed to a lot of adult reading material, including explicit material with parental conversations, it's far better to vet my work and then read and discuss my adult work with your offspring. I will never tell teens and older kids to not read my stuff because I was a teenager that read far beyond my grade and reading level. I was reading adult works as a teenager, very explicit works too. I know there are other older kids and teenagers out there like me that outgrow younger reading material and so I will never tell someone to not read my works. ## Why don't you take a lot of pictures or do a lot of video press appearances? I don't want to do internet based video-based press appearances except for TV appearances or recorded events because video will always be a medium where I'm subjected to the sighted gaze, and frankly, I don't want to make you more comfortable just so you can gaze at me like a sighted person. Video isn't safe for me. It's not safe because it's an immediately hostile environment where I have to surrender to the sighted gaze and I just don't want to do that as of late. This means I will turn my camera off during zoom meetings, I will not enable video when I'm on your YouTube channel, and I certainly won't pretend to be sighted to make sighted people feel comfortable. Video does nothing for me. I have no problem doing TV interviews or live literary events where video will be recorded, however. If I'm doing an event that will be recorded, I have no problem at all doing that. As for pictures, I'm just not a fan of them as of late, especially putting them online. That's why I have a cat image as my picture. The cat image will always be some sort of public domain picture, but rarely will online people ever see a picture of me unless I know you very well. Pictures are a format I can't control, fully, and I'd like anything to do with my author brand to be as minimal as possible. It's also an indirect way to say fuck you to ageism, although, I know that won't stop people commenting on how old or young someone looks. If I do post an image of myself somewhere, consider it a rare treat. ## For those that have never seen you, what do you look like? You can see me on video here but a text description is below. I'm a creamy guy with Ivory skin. Some say I have one blue eye and one green eye. Others say I have blue eyes. As of right now, I have dark brown hair, but I do have a receding hairline. I'm thin, and many in the gay community say I'm cute. I smile easily, and due to the blindness, my eyes are either blankly staring or they wiggle, so I guess you could say I have a little bit of a Nystagmus. I don't know where the Nystagmus comes from because I'm not a doctor, nor do I have any medical knowledge. ## Why don't you like talking on the phone? Because I have a stutter/stammer that causes Prolongations. The two are very different, but I've got a kind of block that prevents me from saying words. It's not the typical stutter where people repeat words, it's the kind of verbal block where I can't say words as fast as other people because there's a blockage in airflow. It's never went away fully but in safe spaces, it's drastically diminished. This safe space is in very few company and very few situations. For example, I have more speech fluency when I am comfortable and relaxed in quiet spaces. If I talk on the phone, people may mistake my pauses for a dropped connection. It's taxing to speak, so unless I know you intimately, we won't be speaking verbally. My own theory is that the stutter was caused when I was given far too much oxygen as a baby, causing me to have the blindness, cerebral palsy, and the stutter because it's a kind of medical trauma that can't be cured. I don't think the brain can heal in that regard so I will be disabled my whole life. ## Do you like to read? What are your favorite books? I love reading! Here's a page of my reading highlights. I'm an audiobook reader. Audiobooks count as reading and I won't be debating with you on this. ## Do you listen to podcasts? What's some of your favorite podcasts? I love podcasts! I love them so much I am a podcast hound. Give me all your podcasts. My podcast page is here where you can also see the kinds of fiction and nonfiction podcasts I like and why I like them. ## Why don't you publish more? Or at least publish faster? Because I'm disabled. My energy is very precious to me, especially as I get older and my disabilities increase and as I learn of other disabilities I have due to age. Long ago, I made it a point to never engage in capitalistic productivity again. I wanted to be productive in my early twenties but not anymore. I never want to be productive for the sake of production. Productivity is a toxic mindset that inhibits relationships, and the found family and loved ones in my life are far more important than making stuff for the internet to judge, and consume, rather than appreciate and enjoy. this is why I write a lot more than I publish. I'll never stop writing. It's my choice what to publish, and when to publish it. Writing is my life, but me choosing to publish something is me giving you the chance to treat something with care. You don't have to like anything I do, just treat it with care, because even if you don't like it, someone else will. Accept my work isn't for you and give it to someone that may/will enjoy it. For me, writing is an accessibility aid. It allows me to articulate what I can't verbally say, but especially online, people don't appreciate the artist. To publishers and readers, we're just content farms. Readers place unrealistic expectations on us to make stuff faster and this treats us like a product line instead of people. To reject all of that toxic mindset, I never publish to readers expectations. I never have, and never will. Readers can wait. ## How do you use a computer if you're blind? I use a screen reader. A screen reader is controlled via keyboard commands. I do not talk to my computer because of my speech disability. I also use these accessible tools and services that were designed for the blind in mind. My mobile phone has a screen reader too. The screen reader allows me to navigate the phone in a different way than you do but it makes the phone accessible to me. ## If I'm supporting you financially on an ongoing basis, why do you still give your work away for free? There's a few reasons I give my work away for free to anybody that asks for it. It combats censorship. In a hostile world that hates minorities of any kind, and financially disadvantaged people, actively giving my work away for free is the best way I can keep kicking censorship until it stays down. I hate censorship of any kind, no matter who does it and why they justify doing it. This is why I actively read every bigoted book I can get my hands on. It is a way for me to arm myself and challenge myself. I will fight you if you want to take this reading power away from me. If I choose to read problematic or bigoted books, you can share better books rather than telling me not to read these kinds of books. Providing access is very important to me, which is why I don't or rarely do exclusive stuff. Everyone should have access regardless of financial ability. I give my work away for free because everyone deserves to read. By supporting me financially, you're paying it forward. You're making sure others have access to me, even if my work is censored where they are due to bigots or censored because of capitalism. ## How can we make sure you don't deny our event requests? First, become very acquainted with my events page, in full. Before booking me, make your event and accommodations as disability friendly as possible. Start with these event requirements, and then do other research on how to make virtual events accessible and in person events accessible. Make sure to have your spaces fully disability friendly if you want to have an author visit, virtual or in person. Give me months to prepare. For virtual events, ask me a month or more ahead of time, not weeks ahead of time. If it's an in person event, ask three months ahead of time or more.

Updates from my website, along with the occasional personal essay or short story! I’m the worst at being a brand, so this won’t be a topical newsletter. Anything that comes to mind.

Lily Lachance

Mood: Aggressively dorky and entirely unbothered. There is a singular word I would love to ban from everywhere. It has transformed from a nice and descriptive literary word into shorthand internet speak. There is always a certain attitude that follows this word. Everyone that uses the phrase, "that's cringe," hates humans and hates authentic expression, but that hatred of authentic expression can never hold a candle to my hatred of people that use that word like a weapon. I can hear the sneer before they even finish the word. "Cringe." It’s a hateful vocal frequency—thin, compressed, coming entirely from the back of the throat, as if the person speaking is trying to prevent any of the actual, messy world from reaching their lungs. It’s the sound of someone who has traded their pulse for a curated aesthetic, a person who thinks that the ultimate human achievement is to remain entirely unruffled by joy. Cynicism is a slick, frictionless surface. It’s an easy way to slide through life without ever having to risk the social friction of being misunderstood. But the thing about frictionless surfaces is that you can’t actually build anything on them. You just slide. To call something "cringe" is a tactical strike. It’s a way for the Curators of Cool—those self-appointed janitors of the capitalist ego—to tell you that your passion is too loud, too heavy, or too textured for the polite, sterilized room they want us all to live in. They want us to be "curated." They want our interests to be ironic, detached, and easily digestible. Because if you’re unironically obsessed with the granular logistics of a fictional space-faring civilization or the tactile satisfaction of a perfectly organized stamp collection, you’re hard to sell things to. You’ve found a source of heat that doesn't require their permission. I love the earnest ones. I love the people who write eighty-thousand-word fanfictions where the characters finally just sit down and have a decent meal together. I love the people who spend their weekends in humid basements, rolling plastic dice and arguing about the specific weight of a dragon’s breath. There is a magnificent, heavy density to that kind of joy. It’s a thumb pressed firmly into the palm, a reminder that we are real, even when the world wants us to be ghosts or advertiser friendly. They try to shame us into silence. They want us to feel the heat in our cheeks when we talk about the things we love. I know that heat. I grew up in a house where passion was a liability and being "too much" was a punishable offense. But here is the truth: Cynicism is the weapon of the bored and the broken. It is a capitalist tool designed to keep us from connecting, because you can't form a "found family" if you're too busy mocking the person next to you for their "cringe" hobbies. Earnestness is the only thing that actually burns through the static. When you allow yourself to be unironically happy about something "nerdy," you are performing a revolutionary act. You are declaring that your internal heat—that soul-deep vibration that makes your hands shake when you find a rare edition of a beloved book—is more important than the approval of the people who think detachment is a personality. I am so over the cool people, the stiff, give me the high-effort hobbies. Give me the long, lyrical explanations of why a certain game music track is a masterpiece of logic. Give me the people who feel like a warm, scratchy wool blanket instead of a cold, glass screen. Be cringe. Be loud. Be heavy. Because the alternative is to be "cool," and "cool" is just another word for dead. * * * If you enjoyed this opinion, you might enjoy, The Two Princes

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Lily Lachance