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affinity.bsky.social
Harmony. | Collar of Worlds
@affinity.bsky.social
130 followers 51 following 1.5K posts
The thing that controls, even if it's also not what does the controlling. 18+. Most pronouns work.

Author of The Place Where We Can Stop Running, a Human Domestication Guide novel: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58402522

AD: @cayenaleva.bsky.social
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affinity.bsky.social
Not in a way that I'd consider useful. In fact this structure follows best practices for debunking: Lead with the desired interpretation, mention the undesired one briefly, then explain why the undesired interpretation is wrong. (I would normally say "accurate" and "inaccurate", but...)
An excerpt from the above article. Excerpt reads: "Outside the cost and the complications of carrying out a plan that would track voter spending, Mr. Trump’s latest pledge could raise legal questions. Federal laws prohibit expenditures to influence voting, but he has framed his proposal as a promise that will be delivered upon later, as an economic incentive. Jessica Levinson, who teaches election law at Loyola Law School at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said that Mr. Trump’s statement did not seem too far afield from a promise to lower taxes."
September 10, 2026 at 3:39 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Gotta be Prayers of Steel. https://poets.org/poem/prayers-steel
Prayers of Steel, by Carl Sandberg Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations. Lay me on an anvil, O god. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. Take red hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders. Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.
August 7, 2026 at 1:50 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Thinking of becoming a single-issue voter
An excerpt of the Wikipedia article on push polling. Excerpt follows: George W. Bush used push polls in his 1994 bid for Texas Governor against incumbent Ann Richards. Callers asked voters "whether they would be more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if they knew that lesbians dominated on her staff".
May 25, 2026 at 10:09 PM
affinity.bsky.social
I sympathize with this argument, and,
Michael Bolton from Office Space saying "No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
May 3, 2026 at 3:04 AM
affinity.bsky.social
Either this is an incredibly elaborate cosplay or it's an AI remix of a Bizarro comic from 2011.
A hand-drawn image from the comic strip Bizarro, showing a single frame. Three men in biker jackets walk away and to the right from a high angle, showing their jackets. Each is labeled "Acute", "Right", and "Obtuse", and the entire comic is captioned "Hell's Angles".
April 21, 2026 at 9:11 PM
affinity.bsky.social
News used to be better
Howard Beale, the main character of the 1976 movie "Network", at his desk mid-rant. He's pointing angrily at the diagetic camera (the actual camera angle is off to the side). Behind him are two clocks set to different times, and three phones below that, two red, one black.
April 12, 2026 at 8:32 PM
affinity.bsky.social
What's up.
The wikigacha card for legendary shitposter Dril.
April 5, 2026 at 4:06 PM
affinity.bsky.social
So here's an example, via www.pixiv.net/artworks/685... —digitigrade paws are named because they essentially always walk on tiptoes, the heels off the ground. Some furries have more human-style feet where the heel is on the ground (plantigrade), which is all Subscribestar will allow now apparently.
An image of Braixen against a pink background, mid-kick, with a smile on its face. Its digitigrade paw is extended, clearly showing its paw pads (which it walks on), its long foot, its ankle, and its knee.
March 11, 2026 at 4:26 AM
affinity.bsky.social
This is an ad for DuckDuckGo. It offers a choice when the real issue is that LLMs are shoved into everything. "You should let the monsters and the vulnerable people preyed upon by LLMs still use it, and look, you don't have to!"

Cigarette companies denied the existence of secondhand smoke, too.
DuckDuckGo's "yes or no AI" vote page, when you say no. It shows a 94% no result right now, plus a cheerful mention of how if you don't want to use AI, you don't have to! and an invitation to use their search. What you get if you click the link at the bottom inviting you to see what yes looks like: DuckDuckGo's splash page, with "YES AI" in place of their splash image, as if they were about to change their name to Yes AI.
January 17, 2026 at 4:18 AM
affinity.bsky.social
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_n_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2 big CW for slurs, but this is quite literally in the white supremacist playbook, and this article is from 2017. We still don't know how to counter it effectively at scale as a society.
An excerpt from the linked article. Its text is reproduced below. Lulz The tone of the site should be light. Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self- deprecating humor - I am a racist making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don't take myself super-seriously. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas [slur]s. But that's neither here nor there.
December 26, 2025 at 11:33 AM
affinity.bsky.social
✅
A crop of the 1877 painting of the Sermon on the Mount by Carl Bloch, edited to be a meme. Jesus, in the top right, is preaching outdoors with a large crowd gathered all around him. The meme text follows: Jesus: Love your neighbour as yourself Onlooker: Who is my neighbour? Jesus: It's whoever you were hoping I wouldn't say
July 16, 2025 at 8:48 AM
affinity.bsky.social
I grew up on these streets
An image of Clock Town, from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. A brick courtyard contains a thatch awning, a half-built tower with two green-clad construction workers tinkering with it, and abstract designs painted in blues and greens along the walls. A clock tower sits prominently at the back, with an intricate face design of red, yellow, blue and cyan. A hallway through to darkness (a loading zone to the next area) can be seen on the left.
November 5, 2024 at 12:59 PM
affinity.bsky.social
I'm still chewing over Georg Barkas' "The Year In Researching Intimacy", which changed a lot of how I looked at my own relationships and put into words things I was searching for ways to talk about for a while. hazlitt.net/feature/year...
In a scientific intimacy, we might do something that exhibits our own vulnerability instead of constantly asking for the openness of the other. The technical things of intimacy are the ones we know individually but are completely and utterly in the dark about how they will behave when we arrange them in ways we are not used to. The technical things of a scientific intimacy are almost never not obscure or hidden. They are in plain sight and available and even practised, but their arrangement in novel and interesting formations has been restricted by societal norms and so we feel like we can’t use them in any other way. The opposite is true; every encounter, every touch, every kiss can be arranged in a way that it asks rather than tells. Those questions are not those of a false shyness but rather about who the other is. To be intimate with someone is, in this sense, a genuine interest in the other person and to be moved by them. What we learn from a scientific intimacy is more than just another way of looking at the term “intimacy” itself but to look away from that obscure, meaningless construct of intimacy as merely being close to one another. It is an invitation to take the term literally and with it a whole machinery of possibilities. To view intimacy scientifically—that is, to look at how science makes itself familiar with the world—means first and foremost to not assume in advance who the other is but to experiment and to be surprised. It means that we might find properties of one another that we hadn’t anticipated. It also entails the possibility of finding out new things about ourselves, for we might be surprised about how we perceive one another from an ever-changing perspective.
September 5, 2024 at 6:19 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Heavenbanning is the latest torment nexus to have been built, I guess
A tweet from @nearcyan. Tweet is, in its entirety: "heavenbanning, the hypothetical practice of banishing a user from a platform by causing everyone that they speak with to be replaced by Al models that constantly agree and praise them, but only from their own perspective, is entirely feasible with the current state of Al/LLMs" There is a fake New York Times article embedded in the original tweet, headlined "Reddit's new 'Heaven Banning' pilocy proces controversial". Its body text will be in the next image. Reddit's new method of dealing with trolls has proven highly effective. However, some think it poses grave ethical questions. Since discovering he was heaven banned, Reddit user Albert Tallan had this to say, "I thought these bots were my friends; I shared my life with them. I feel so manipulated. A whole month of my online life was an elaborate fiction." When Albert Tallan lost his job last spring, he took his frustrations out in various subreddits. At first, his comments were not well received. He was called a troll and mocked for the frequent solecisms in his prose. But slowly things seemed to change. Mocking transitioned to fulsome praise. From his perspective, it seemed he was becoming a pillar of various subreddits he visited. In reality, his comments were invisible to all users besides himself. Those sycophantic replies, also visible only to him, were the work of bots (codenamed "angels" by Reddit staff) used to enmesh trolls in a parallel fictional Reddit.
August 22, 2024 at 9:55 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Vegas bookies put money on who shot Mr. Burns, which was a cliffhanger from the Golden Era of The Simpsons. (If these odds were accurate, you could get a free 70x return on your investment by betting on Maggie.)
A board from The Mirage showing the odds of "who shot Mr. Burns?" Said odds: Homer Simpson, 2/1 Waylon Smithers, 5/2 Krusty the Clown, 3/1 Bart Simpson, 4/1 Barney Gumbel [sic, should be "Gumble"], 5/1 Hans Moleman, 7/1 Moe the Bartender (they gave him a last name in this episode so the clues would point to him!), 8/1 Abraham "Grampa" Simpson, 10/1 Mayor "Diamond Joe" Quimby, 12/1 Apu Nahasapeemspetilan [sic, should be "Nahasapeemapetilon"]: 15/1 Lisa Simpson: 20/1 "Snake" (AKA Jailbird): 25/1 Principal Seymour Skinner: 30/1 Sideshow Mel: 40/1 Groundskeeper Willie: 40/1 The Old Sea Captain: 50/1 Nelson Muntz: 60/1 Maggie Simpson: 70/1 There's at least one more entry (Mrs. Edna Krabappel [sic, she is famously not married]), but it's cut off at the bottom.
August 17, 2024 at 12:41 AM
affinity.bsky.social
Post a non-religious picture you think of as holy.
The final frame of an installment of the now-defunct webcomic Minus. A small girl in a blue skirt stands on top of a mountain, staring down a meteor hurtling towards the earth. She has a baseball bat.
August 16, 2024 at 1:15 PM
affinity.bsky.social
Unlike you, I get my news from a reliable source.
Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting. A white man with short, dark hair in a brown jacket over a blue plaid shirt stands up in a crowd, putting both hands on the wood bench in front of him. He holds his chin high and is mid-speech, looking out and to the left. A crowd of onlookers mostly look at him, notably another white man with dark hair in a grey suit, white dress shirt, and black tie, sitting in front of him and leaning back to look up at him, and an older white man with grey hair and a black suit sitting next to him. In the speaking man's pocket and in the second man's hand is a report of some kind on blue paper, and the older man has it bunched up in his hand as if considering striking the speaking man.
August 9, 2024 at 4:23 AM
affinity.bsky.social
Share your lock screen:

I have an iOS shortcut that rotates the wallpaper through Control photos my partner took. It's currently this.
A photo of my lock screen. A large alien with no visible limbs looms over a platform in a dim grey fog, its lone eye casting a searchlight in front of the camera. Overlaid near the top of the frame is a calendar listing, the time in large font, and four weather widgets. (It's 22C, 83% humidity, with an AQI rating of 2 and a cloud ceiling of 900m.)
August 8, 2024 at 3:49 PM
affinity.bsky.social
I'm being very clear. Her pronouns are she/her. You switched pronoun sets but not to she/her. That is as much a mistake as using he/him. I took the liberty of underlining the posts in question.

You can't edit the posts. You could delete them. But you can always start doing the right thing now.
August 4, 2024 at 12:42 AM
affinity.bsky.social
Post the television character you most identify with.

You said people come here to change the story of their lives. I imagined a story where I didn't have to be the damsel."
Dolores Abernathy, from Westworld. Here she wears a pinstriped button-up shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and is pointing a revolver off-camera.
August 1, 2024 at 6:25 PM
affinity.bsky.social
This one, however. twitter.com/dril/status/...
A dril tweet from 2018. It reads in its entirety: i Fucking hate it when i come at the king and miss, especially when I best not do that
July 14, 2024 at 5:32 PM
affinity.bsky.social
A line from The Simpsons that describes your sex life:
A screenshot from The Secret War of Lisa Simpson. Military cadet Lisa and Bart are having a conversation in private, and Bart, who has been staring at his shoes the whole time, keeps using footwear-based analogies. His latest is "Like a sock-maker secretly working on a top secret sock--" and Lisa cuts him off with "Will you stop looking at your feet?"
July 6, 2024 at 6:28 PM
affinity.bsky.social
The only debate that really matters.
An older white man in a black suit and burgundy tie, sitting at a dark-coloured table. A blurred nameplate sits before him. Microphones are pointed on either side towards two other people, mostly out of frame. The man has both arms on the table, gripping a pencil like he's about to snap it, looking murderously across at the viewer. An older man in a grey suit and periwinkle tie. He is sitting at a similar table as the other man. Two microphones are pointed at him on either side of the frame, and he has both arms resting comfortably on the table. He looks back across the table, calmer but still notably annoyed. (This and the previous man are the two main characters from Run the Jewels' music video for "Nobody Speak".)
June 30, 2024 at 4:46 PM
affinity.bsky.social
This among other things is a big reason why I've internalized xkcd's "Ten Thousand" comic: xkcd.com/1053/ I really, really like encouraging curiosity, even -- maybe especially -- if it's for important things that people are actively discouraged or structurally disincentivized
from learning about.
A two-panel xkcd comic. The first panel has a floating caption above it that begins: "I try not to make fun of people for admitting that they don't know things." A box below continues: "Because for each thing "everyone knows" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time." The math follows: Fraction who have had it at birth = 0%. Fraction who have heard of it by 30 ~= 100%. US birth rate ~= 4,000,000/year. Number hearing about it for the first time ~= 10,000/day." The second panel has a similar floating caption box: "If I make fun of people, I train them not to tell me when they have those moments. And I miss out on the fun." The panel itself is a stick figure with shoulder-length black hair telling a cueball stick figure, "'Diet coke and mentos thing'? What's that?" Cueball responds, "On man! Come on, we're going to the grocery store." Black-haired figure: "Why?" Cueball: "You're one of today's lucky 10,000."
June 20, 2024 at 12:26 AM
affinity.bsky.social
The other week I saw a meme that used the demotivational poster format as a skeuomorph. Like, it wasn't in the content format of a demotivational poster -- it was just a caption, not a theme word plus a slogan -- but it used the black border with white trim and white serif font.
A meme drawn by Nyxie on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TateOfTot/status/1752573021468921920). A bust sketch of Izutsumi, from Dungeon meshi, looking directly at the viewer. She is a dark-haired, pale-skinned catgirl with one white-tipped ear and mustard-yellow feline eyes. She wears a large red scarf and a brown sleeveless top. This picture is surrounded on three sides by a wide black border with white trim near the picture. Underneath, in demotivational poster style, is the phrase "I have hired this cat to stare at you".
June 14, 2024 at 6:34 PM