Katherine Villyard @kvillyard@librem.one

Durham County, North Carolina serving 32k students just passed extremely strong school board protections for trans students!

This came after a wave of anti-trans candidates lost, including school board candidates in NC.

Subscribe to support my work.

https://erininthemorn.substack.com/p/large-north-carolina-school-district

So much for freedom of speech on Twitter.

If Mastodon diehards want this to be The Next Place after Twitter, the move is to bend over backwards to listen to disabled and Black community about what they do and don't need in social media space.

Even if it's challenging.

Even if it makes you uncomfortable.

These are power user communities, whether folks like it or not.

In the past 24 hours, Ukrainians have been been blocked from signing up for Twitter using their phone numbers and using 2FA and accounts tracking Russian oligarchs' jets have been suspended.

What happens on Twitter can seem like a sideshow, but Elon Musk's actions are a direct threat to democracy.

I have fewer followers on Mastodon than on Twitter by an order of magnitude, but I'm guessing the number of followers here who are bots/trolls is much closer to zero than over there. Hello, real humans!

Today, President Biden will sign the Respect for Marriage Act. It will nullify the odious act known as DOMA, which had enshrined anti LGBTQ+ prejudice and discrimination into law.
Federal recognition of same sex marriages, by statute, is an important safeguard, but we must still do more. We must now enshrine the protections of Obergefell into law, so that no state can deny same-sex couples the rights and privileges afforded heterosexual married couples.

Yeah, just to be crystal clear on this, on behalf of #Trans people working in #TransHealth everywhere: one of the reasons we feel constantly under attack is the NYT editorial board. I'm glad they ran this story, but nothing grinds my gears more than when centrist media outlets who have previously traded trans lives for clicks publish "why is this happening?" think pieces, as if it's some unanswerable question. https://archive.ph/Nhauz #ProtectTransKids #ProtectTransHealth

Twitter was free because we were the product of a marketing service.

Mastodon is free software but someone will have to pay the bill for the servers. When the server admins come asking for help, don't be offended and be ready to chip in

What's up with the crow?

Like us, crows are highly intelligent ecological generalists that make a living not by executing simple fixed action patterns, but rather by learning about their environments and figuring out how to exploit them.

This bird has discovered that a metal bracket on a railing is precisely the right size and shape to hold a mussel while cracking it open.

Washington DC voted to make its bus system fare-free, starting July 1. This is big...the first major city to make their bus service completely free, and hopefully will serve as an example to other bus services around the nation. This makes the busses available not only to the middle class but also to the very poor who can't afford transit...in other words, greater equity. (Yes, this is me in my transit advocacy mode.) #transit #bus #PublicTransit

LANGUAGE: It’s enslaved persons, not “slaves”. We are people who were ENslaved. When you say “enslaved”, you make clear that someone else did this to us. When you say “slave” you speak the language and mindset of the people who did this to us. This is important. It is not semantics. #history #language #enslavedpeople #Black #Mastodon #words

big reminder that one of the reasons we don't have universal healthcare is because when its provided by our employer they can use our literal lives against us if we try to fight back against unfair labor practices.

I've had a week already, but at least I can delight in my seashells. I almost hate to part with this one as I'll send it on its way to its new owner tomorrow. It uses one of my favorite glass colors - so much brown and a metallic reduction surface, it looks almost steampunk. Magical mechanical sea snails...

Someone fired a round through the window of The Taproom in Renton WA today around noon. No one was inside so no one was harmed. This is where RWers on fb have threatened to protest a Drag Story Hour. Sign was put up by employees.

When I hear about the coup attempt in Germany & the desire of these violent extremists to insert Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss as the leader after a planned execution of the German chancellor, it sounds ludicrous, laughable. But that's the thing: These people are deadly serious.

Because the plots of these anti-democratic extremists often seem so ludicrous, they can succeed because the public--& too many leaders--don't take them seriously enough. This tendency is how Trump got as far as he did.

Get a chance to win my friend’s excellent new collection of short SF/F fiction. https://www.katherinevillyard.com/2022/12/06/win-a-paperback-copy-of-love-stories/

RT @FondaJLee@twitter.com

The @locusmag@twitter.com fundraiser has 10 days left to raise about $18K meet their goal. There are still plenty of cool rewards available including a signed, personalized hardcover set of the Green Bone Saga. Please donate and keep Locus going! https://igg.me/at/locusmag

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/FondaJLee/status/1600212224563621889

Who is going to tell the Texans that kids don't become queer by seeing drag shows? Kids become queer by seeing Linda Hamilton do pull-ups in Terminator 2.

So let’s see if Mastodon can be used to find jobs. Please boost for visibility! 🙏

Irina Truong is one of the best senior #Python developers I know. Her work is always outstanding and polished. She also contributes to open source: https://github.com/j-bennet. You want her in your team, trust me.

Unfortunately she was part of the 13% recently laid off by #Elastic. This is your luck! She’s now open to work: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irinatruong