Yeah yes yes, the most compelling creative reason to stay focused going into 2025

Honored to have my poem “Michigan” from Consider the Rooster featured today at Poetry Daily.

This book means so much to me, and I’m so grateful to everyone who’s supported it and made space for its words. 💖 If you haven’t yet, grab a copy of Consider the Rooster—available now from Nightboat Books.

if it wasn’t for the disability community, i literally would not have known how to survive this ongoing pandemic. [waves feebly at H1N1 and mpox]

i wouldn’t know about various mitigations like k95s, nasal spray, and mouthwash, or RAT test accuracy being 49%, or plus life test, and clean air. 1/2

I really do worry that years of algorithmic feeds just trained people into learned helplessness over what they see on social media, sometimes

i cannot stress this enough, if there is something (sports, books, whatever) you don't want to see on this site, mute terms and block accounts as liberally as you want. clean up your own feed. you don't need to dictate other people's harmless interests lol.

Stop Mask Bans Take action to stop mask bans.

NEW: @fightforthefuture.org and a huge coalition of civil liberties, human rights, and disability justice groups have launched a campaign against mask bans at protests

It includes an action-map where you can plug in with local efforts against these draconian laws.

www.stopmaskbans.com

i think it’s possible to simultaneously be trying to be a better person, feel angry, feel joy, be in pain, laugh at ourselves, & be in the process of healing. it’s never either or; always ampersand

A rap battle is two men writing poems about each other

Huge win from @franzanth.bsky.social creating a Content Scraper Blocklist: bsky.app/profile/cont...

It's a blocklist for the kinds of engagement bait accounts that repost stolen content, often with misleading captions.

I highly recommend that you keep Blue Sky a happy place by liberally blocking folks who question your rights (perfectly happy if you question my ideas!). When someone says something anti-Muslim I add them to this list in case you want to tag along: bsky.app/profile/did:...

The point I want to make is this:
Here on Bluesky, we have the tools we need to moderate our feeds as we want. But we need to be an active part of it.

Use labeling groups like the one I mentioned, but vet them. So you know you aren't blocking stuff you don't want blocked. But the tools are there.

Go to Settings > Moderation > Muted words & tags.
Add commonly used phrases by these users (but not too common, otherwise it'll block normal sane posts as well), and you'll be sorted.

Don't forget to make use of labels as well. Whilst not perfect, here's one you might like: bsky.app/profile/skyw...

4/ We’re expanding our moderation team as we grow to improve both the timeliness and accuracy of our moderation actions. Thank you for your understanding and your feedback.

3/ We notified users who were affected by this decision by email, and they can appeal by replying to the email.

Anyone who appeals will get a comprehensive review and will be reinstated if they have not violated our Community Guidelines.

2/ This resulted in over-enforcement and temporary suspensions for multiple users. We have reinstated accounts of some users, and are continuing to review appeals.

1/ We're experiencing a huge influx of users, and with that, a predictable uptick in harmful content posted to the network.

As a result, for some very high-severity policy areas like child safety, we recently made some short-term moderation choices to prioritize recall over precision.