Vanellope

I swear to god the next time I see someone talking about a character's "tummy" and it's completely flat I'm hooking the poster up to a feeding tube for a month

I accept that challenge~

if you know that your computer crashed, you're a user.
if you know why your computer crashed, you're a technician.
if you know how your computer crashed, you're an engineer.
if you know who crashed your computer, you're the developer.
and if you don't know which, but you know how many computers crashed, you're an SRE. 🙏

They want a war on us because they desperately need anything to cling to power, and we're an easy target because let's face it: even most proud Democrats are at least a little homophobic if you catch them in an unguarded moment.

They know they can go after us and the people in power, even the supposedly "progressive" ones, will quietly look the other way.

They¹ want us to take it off the streets so they can target us in the alleyways, they want us to take it out of the light so they can hunt us in the darkness. "Be respectable" is saying "be out of sight", and atrocities thrive when they are not seen.

They can't hurt us openly yet, so they demand we are respectable and quiet so they don't have to hide our screams. Only be obvious about your queerness in specialized containers so we can grab a dozen of you at once, call it obscenity or call it a tragic accident or call it a lone wolf.

They cannot force us into special neighborhoods yet, but they can moralize us into hiding when we're not gathered.

If your existence makes cishet people uncomfortable, then exist more so they have to adapt to you. Be loud. Be open. Because if only one of us is that person is a target, but if all of us are than we are a fucking movement.

And the reason is obvious, too. You see it happening all the time. Nixon did a similar version - quote is form a former aide of his, pulled from here:

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

Except now they can't make it illegal to be gay or trans, but by getting the public to associate gays with kink and trans with drag, and then criminalizing both heavily.... well, I don't need to say the rest. And we can't forget how the fascists and their ilk try to associate queerness with "leftist ideology" or how anti-queer measures disproportionally disrupt BIPOC communities - it's all connected, and that's why intersectionality is so important.

The cops are not our friends. There is no being "one of the good ones." And if you're trying to get other queer people to be respectable, you're just helping those with power push your queer siblings into neat little pens before they come for you.

1. And to avoid implications, They here refers to the cops, and the GOP, and the evangelicals, and of course the capitalists who all find us uncomfortable and inconvenient.

literally all of the fed/cops that infiltrate leftist groups encourage them to buy guns illegally as the way to arrests. it’s the fed playbook.

• Do not own or carry illegal weapons or anything like that; don't commit petty crimes in general. Don't give the pigs an excuse. People have gotten fucked over misfiled taxes or parking tickets. As far as owning and carrying weapons goes, the fash are helping us out here for now, at least in the states, but remember that Ronald Reagan dropped the first gun control laws in this fucking country specifically to disarm the BPP. The current situation is unlikely to last forever so do what you can while you can.
• Use Signal, use Tor, use mail encryption, don't talk about anything you don't absolutely have to anyway.
• Anything you don't want people to know, do not write it down anywhere, ever. Everything else, document the fuck out of.
• Don't act suspicious. Keep to your usual patterns of behavior. Always have a solid, legitimate and aboveboard reason for anything you do. If you want to do something that will require seriously deviating from your usual behavior, find a way and a reason to start setting up new patterns well in advance.
• Do not let anyone convince you to do anything that feels off or you're just not comfortable with for any reason. Trust your gut if something seems sketchy. Doesn't matter if you've known someone your whole life, CIs come in all shapes and sizes.

In spite of the CPU running at 65 Degrees, it does work. However, if you use DietPi instead of Debian, to make it run properly, you need to install man-db and manpages via apt to get it installing properly.