A page in Reader’s Digest reading “Elf Mayhem is Taking Over”
six months ago Reader’s Digest asked if they could purchase the publishing rights for this elaborate shitpost I wrote a year ago now wherein I pretended to be the elf equivalent of David Brooks at the North Pole. Thought it was maybe a phishing scam but it’s real LMAOO
lubna and her children need food and medicine 🖤
Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared. It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.
If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top.
www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...
I also really recommend looking into Da’Shaun Harrison’s work around the politics of ugly
I really recommend reading this piece: wyvarchive.com/ugly-white-s...
By insulting others’ looks to defend OIandria, you are reinforcing a system that harms other Black women.
It is like body positivity Body positivity (still centering beauty as something aspirational and virtuous - just widening the definition of “beauty”)
vs
Body Neutrality (doing away with the concept of beauty altogether)
To invest into conventional beauty standards means you invest in the ideas of featurism, colorism, texturism, fatphobia, etc. There will always be “exceptions,” but beauty/lookism in our society is very violent and has material consequence. (1 example darker skinned ppl getting harsher sentences)
Comment 1: “The way people treat Olandria is giving jealousy.” Comment 2: “ITS GIVING JEALOUSYYY, ITS GIVING HATE, ENVYYYY”
Comment 1: Anyone who calls Olandria ugly is literally just envious cuz what the hell. She has goddess level beauty. She is one of the most beautiful women l've ever seen.”
Comment: “Andrew Schultz is the only public figure who resembles Sid the Sloth. You don't have to doctor his image at all just look at him for a minute.”
Comment 1: “How are they calling the objectively beautiful woman ugly” Comment 2: “Jealousy!! These people are crashing out”
So now you have ppl in the comments of this video saying things like “objectively beautiful” (how would you even begin to define objective beauty w/o defaulting to white supremacist talking points?) or calling others “jealous” reinforcing the idea of beauty as a rare commodity to be valued
Her putting sunglasses around her waist was a form of body checking. The “challenge” is about thinness. The response to that criticism shouldn’t be “white celebs got away with it” it should be that all participants should be criticized for participating in a fat-phobic trend!
Bean @HELIOARIA I support defending black women online, especially dark skinned ones - but a lot of people's support is expressed through how much they *desire* said person or through emphasizing their beauty as virtuous The implication around that is concerning "Beauty" as representation is not liberation for dark skinned black ppl. You are reinforcing certain standards around desirability and implicitly saying that if one is not beautiful + dark then violence against them is allowed Beauty is neutral and it changes depending on cultural factors. It seems weird to place so much on something so flimsy. Beauty is not protection. (There's another phenomenon running through this behavior around celebrity culture, deification as dehumanization, and beauty being enough to form a career around, but that's a whole thesis in itself)
Bean @HELIOARIA This especially happens with non-black ppl, but I've seen the d*vest black women use celebrities/influencers who benefit from general desirability as a point of activism, and it is very strange
The 1st thing a lot of ppl did when Megan Thee Stallion got shot was to post about how good she looks. When Beyonce got cheated on the convo was primarily around how she was too beautiful to be cheated on These examples are implicitly saying “beautiful ppl don't deserve harm" Love Island is a show that is more about desirability than love, but when Olandria was crossed, the convo became about how she was beautiful and didn't deserve it. Edits and fan accounts sprung up in her defense (good) but were all centered around her beauty. It happens over, and over. The undercurrent of these behaviors is showing Black women that to be defended, you must fit within a certain beauty standard. The "love" and "care" becomes conditional
Beauty is not a virtuous thing. It isn’t something to aspire to either. Beauty politics will always keep certain groups of people out in order to maintain beauty as power. It doesn’t help Black women to reify beauty standards. I talked about this on the other site.
I typically like his content but there were many parts of this that felt like a miss and it shows in the comments of the video :(
Palestinians were censored on here from the beginning, and now its only ramping up
“Violence is unacceptable, our thoughts go out to someone who repeatedly incited violence” 🤔
if this happens to anyone less important than a top-20 media personality or a senator they will spit on our graves for anything controversial we ever said, or any stand we ever took, and we all know it
1) pic of Melissa and Mark Hortman 2) pic of Melissa Hortman and dog Gilbert
Remembering MN house speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark and their beloved dog Gilbert. Murdered in June at their home by a rightwing Trump-voting evangelist, who also shot another MN lawmaker and his wife at THEIR home, 9 and 8 times, respectively (miraculously, they survived).
I was thinking I would just take it down temporarily but banning a journalist for quoting their own article about Kirk just because it wasn't a hagiography sickens me and I don't see it getting better anytime soon
you cant even say the white supremacist who stoked the flames for hateful rhetoric should rest in piss on here without your account getting suspended lol aftermath.site/charlie-kirk...
@bsky.app suspended nathan's account for saying 'rest in piss', unbelievable
if charlie kirk didn't get shot the right wing would be equally and as consequentially as mad about a tv commercial or restaurant logo or something else, they're gonna do what they're gonna do regardless
Bro got one of my favorite voices in indie rap. Hip-hop don't make baritones like this anymore tbh
today is a great day to remind everyone that gendering trans people is not conditional. it's not something that we earn by being good. it's not something we have to work our way up to by proving we deserve it. it's done freely, with no limit, for everyone. yes, even trans people you disagree with.
You know that post btw a car’s windshield and side window? It’s called an A-pillar – and it’s becoming a problem.
A-pillars are expanding, enlarging driver blind zones and concealing pedestrians at crosswalks.
Blame car bloat, as well as ill-conceived federal rules.
Me, in Bloomberg 🧵
a la bloomfilters: women can do anything!!!!
Me and the lead vocalist of Squeamish. He’s on the left flipping the camera off, and I’m on the right pointing to my jaw
A closeup of my jaw with a slightly faded sharpie signature on it
Got socked in the jaw in the Squeamish mosh pit and had the lead singer sign my jaw after
There is an awkward aspect of this conversation that I could not discuss in the text, given its focus on a generalized theory of how racialization often deploys gendering.
So I'd like to talk about the bizarre and uncomfortable usage of the term "Eurocentric beauty standards" in trans discourses.