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gwennavierre · 7 months

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Alternatives to Harmful Crisis Lines

What’s the issue with mainstream crisis lines?

In January 2022, an article came out that exposed the fact that the Crisis Text Line was selling personal data to for-profit companies. The Trevor Project also was mentioned in this article for sharing data with Google and Meta.

They aren’t the only crisis lines with issues: this article that also came out in January 2022 talks about how the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is ignoring the testimony from their Lived Experience Committee about stopping involvment with cops, and is working with the Federal Communications Comission to try to get permission to use a newer type of mass surveillence technology during their calls.

Quote from the article: “Basically, Vibrant/NSPL argued that everyone who calls, texts, or chats through the new 988 number should have their personal information and exact current geolocation to within three meters exposed to NSPL call centers automatically, immediately, and by default.”

Beyond these ethical issues around data collection, a huge problem with almost every single crisis line is their policies of “active rescue”: basically, what this means is that crisis lines will track your location and send police to your location if they think you’re at risk of harming yourself. This happens hundreds of thousands of times every single year. This is extremely dangerous, especially for Black people using these lines. There are examples of people being shot because of calls made to hotlines where police showed up. Police showing up also leads to forced psychiatric incarceration. I personally have had the police called on me twice through a crisis line that I thought was anonymous; they showed up, entered my room without my consent, and searched me without my consent. They literally made everything in that moment worse.

If people want to learn more about the history of police involvment and crisis lines, here’s an article.

Avoid hotlines that call the cops:

Crisis Text Line

Trevor Project

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

NAMI helpline

LGBT National Hotline

SAMHSA National Hotline

List of State Crisis Lines that all call cops

Alternatives that do not share data or call the cops

Pretty much every national and mainstream crisis line calls the cops. A general rule of thumb is that unless it specifically mentions that it doesn’t call the cops on their website, it does. I also haven’t done a ton of research on the data sharing side for the lines I’m listing below, but if anyone has any more info please let me know and I’ll update the list.

National:

Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860, 24/7

THRIVE: text message line at 313-662-8209, 24/7

Promise Resource Network: (833) 390-7728, 24/7

Project Return Peer Support Network: (888) 448-9777 English or (888) 448-4055 Spanish, hours are Monday through Friday 2:30 PM to 10:00 PM and Saturday and Sunday 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM

Wildflower Alliance Peer Support Line: 888-407-4515, hours are 7pm to 9pm Monday through Thursday and 7pm-10pm Friday through Sunday

Key Consumer Organization: 800-933-5397, hours are 8am - 4:30pm, Monday - Friday.

MBRLC Peer Support Line: 877-733-7563, hours are 4 pm-7:45 pm every day.

Check out this page for a directory of warmlines by state. These are much less likely to call the cops, but it’s good to check with each individual one about specific policies.

If anyone has more info, please add on!

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gwennavierre · 8 months

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Whitewashing in the ml fandom and why you shouldnt do (or support) it

Disclaimer: Because I am a Black person and the characters I am talking about are Black, this post will specifically address the white washing of Black people and characters.

What is white washing? White washing in the context of fanart is when you take a character of color, usually one with brown/black skin, and either make their skin lighter, give them more Eurocentric features, or both.

Why is it harmful? To explain why this is harmful, I will use one of the first examples of fanart; renaissance paintings of ancient Greek myths. Specifically, artwork featuring Princess Andromeda. Go to your search engine and type in "princess Andromeda". Based on those images, you would never have known that in the original Greek legends, Andromeda was black. So why is she most often depicted as a white woman?

McGrath’s article was definitive in addressing three things: that all the Greek mythographers placed Andromeda as a princess of Ethiopia, that Ovid specifically refers to her dark skin and that artists throughout Western art history frequently omitted to depict her blackness because Andromeda was supposed to be beautiful, and blackness and beauty – for many of them – was dichotomous.

That quote is from this article, and I highly recommend you give it a read. When you whitewash a character, you are perpetuating the idea in the quote above. That this character you like, whether you like them because they're funny or smart or beautiful, cannot be those things and also have black features.

White washing in miraculous ladybug

The show itself is guilty of whitewashing it's own characters. For example, look at these side by sides of Alya and Max alongside their hero alter egos.

Was this done with malicious intent? Hopefully not. But intentional or not, what it says to the people watching is, "These characters cannot have darker skin and also be heroes." And if you think it's not that deep, it is. The show's inconsistencies can't be used as an excuse for whitewashed fanart, because this shit isn't okay either.

Colorism and whitewashing

I'm going to bring up colorism, because even though Max's skin is lighter in that image, he still looks black. However, that doesn't make it okay.

colorism: prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group:

Lighter skinned Black people, while still targets of racism, are closer to whiteness than darker skinned Black people, and in some cases face less discrimination. When Black people first started to appear on TV, it was generally lighter skinned ones because that was more acceptable. This article goes more in depth about colorism.

Misogynoir and whitewashing.

Misogynoir is a word coined to describe the unique hatred that black women face. It is the intersection of racism and misogyny.

People may whitewash a female presenting character but not a male presenting character. In this fandom, you see it with DJWIFI fanart. People will make alyas skin color significantly lighter than Ninos. One trait of misogyny is tying a womans worth to their beauty. When you realize that beauty and blackness were (and still are) seen as antonyms, the issue with this type of whitewashing is made clear.

Texturism and whitewashing

texturism: a form of social injustice, where afro-textured hair or coarse hair types are viewed negatively, often perceived as "unprofessional", "unattractive", or "unclean".

When Black characters were first introduced to media, aspects of them would be changed to heighten their proximity to whiteness and make them more palatable to white audiences. Black women would get perms or silk presses, and Black men would keep their hair cut short and "tidy."

Note: This does not mean that all Black women with silk presses or perms or all Black men with short hair are trying to heighten their proximity to whiteness, or do not love themselves and their hair.

Animation has a history of not representing Black hair. Nowadays, Black hair is more represented, and beautifully so. Just look at movies like Encanto and Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse or TV shows like Moon girl and Devil Dinosaur.

In Miraculous Ladybug, Max is the only character with blatantly afro hair. Nino's hair is always covered and is cut short, and Alya's hair has a looser texture. Therefore, I give fanartists a pass on that one. However, this is a good thing to be aware of anyway.

How can you help?

Don't create, support, or reblog whitewashed art.

(P.S. if anyone wants to come on this post bripnging up blackwashing, read this post of mine)

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gwennavierre · 9 months

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Anyone with hearing or audio processing issues, a few notes here on some things we may have missed in GO2.

Do you know anything about why the subtitles for Good Omens 2 were so poorly done/inaccurate?

I don't know. Probably I won't know, at least as long as I'm on strike.

This probably happened because I'm on strike. On S1 I checked the closed captions that the BBC made and I checked the scripts that went out to foreign countries to be dubbed or subbed. For S2, Amazon did that stuff directly, and I was on strike and unable to do a final check and correct it.

Having said that, whoever does the captions is meant to refer to the scripts, so I don't understand why they were so off. I feel guilty, because it shouldn't have happened: it's not fair on the hard of hearing or anyone relying on the closed captions for aid. Nobody relying on the closed captions knows about Mrs Sandwich's hatpin, for example, or knows that Shax brought Crowley's mail to the bookshop, or that the first Doctor Who Annual was cover-dated 1966.

I very much hope it will be corrected soon.

#go s2 #good omens s2 spoilers #Subtitles #deafawareness #deaf #hearingloss #hard of hearing #hearing problems #the subtitles issue #go s2 spoilers #Good omens

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gwennavierre · 9 months

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I need UK journalists to not show 43 degrees is not beach weather like people are gonna die

Americans do not interact

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gwennavierre · 10 months

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There's a line in a book of advice that says something along the lines of "you may fascinate a woman by gifting her cheese" and I think that fan read that book.