elilla&, famigerada travesti

sometimes I feel that I'm just spinning gears here, trapped in an industry I despise, burning all my salary in bills, all for what?

then my daughter was talking to me the other day about how all her artist friends have parents that like, nag them about getting a job or moving out, and she never felt pressured this way but feel safe and welcomed home. and to watch my adoptive kids, betrayed by all of family and society and our so-called "community", slowly but surely heal enough to face things that would scare most of us, and tell me: our own parents wouldn't have done this for us. then I'm like oh right, that's what it's for.

like we talk a lot of taking others for granted in our relationships but I think I take myself for granted. my hands-off way of parenting feels like I'm not dong enough, like my hands-off way of gardening; but there's a difference between not watering a plant, and letting them grow according to their nature.

like I come from several generations of parental abuse and abandonment, and I broke that chain. if I achieve nothing else in life, that alone was worth more than any diplomas or accolades.

it's because we refuse mandates

today's my daughter's birthday!! :02yay:

remember the onion queen that I was waxing lyrical the other day, about how she hibernated for more than a year and I didn't know if she was still alive and then she put out leaves and still no flowers and then went back to onion mode and now, out of season, suddenly pushed out a big spike all of a sudden? that was the reason. she opened her huge, magnificent buds exactly today 😌

will have to pay 240€ for the Dolmetscher that supported us during that legal dispute with Vonovia :bowsette_redhead_angry:

when they offered me an interpreter no one said it would be paid, let alone offer me a cost estimate. I would have rohgehundet das Deutsch if I knew my extremely tight budget would get such a hole in it

is dying, apparently:

DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and that’s before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.

I've said before that one of the very few good things generative "AI" may do to the world is accelerating the enshittification cycle so much that it kills stuff that was already terrible and a drain on society (social media; platformization; curation algorithms…). Speaking as a linguist who speaks 4 languages and has read the literature on second language acquisition, it has always been my position that the Duolingo method is useless—it feels like you are learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours with it and gold a full tree and you'll still get nowhere, and if you put a fraction of the time in about any other method, including doing pen-and-paper drills with old-fashioned paper-based textbooks, you'd have progressed much faster.

And old-fashioned grammar drills suck, too. It's just that Duolingo really, really sucks.

(Methods that work better: 1) Find an intensive "conversation"-type course, or anything that is labelled as "natural" or "immersion" or "storytelling" methods; or get tandem partners; or online coaches such as in italki; failing that, join a conventional language course, the more "intensive" the better; work on these until you absorb basic grammar and vocabulary, focusing on spoken language not writing; 2) Once this bootstrap period is over, start talking to people, watching media, or reading stuf that interests you, in large quantities and every day; do not wait until you're "good" to move into the input stage, start actually using the language for things you wanted it for, as soon as possible, which is sooner than you think; partial comprehension is fine.)

Of course I hope Duolingo dies horribly in a fire after it backstabbed its workers with the "AI memo", but even if it didn't, the world is better off without it.

One lesson we can get from this: Consider that overnight 25% drop in investment, which may well prove to be the coup the grâce. It was not caused by Duo losing users or enshittifying with "AI", but by the opposite: investors mass panicked at the company setting its target revenue too low, as in a mere… 1.22 billion, rather than the 1.26 billion the investors wanted. Now the reason Duolingo is not chasing that higher goal is that they're seeing the writing on the wall, and went into damage control mode: they're pulling down a bit on squeezing their current paying users and trying to improve the experience of the free tier, in an attempt to reverse the bleed and bring in more customers.

In other words, Duolingo tried to slow down the slightest tiny bit on enshittification—3% less cash—and this already got swift punishment from the market gods. With capitalism, there is no long-term thinking: you're expected to provide the richest people on Earth with infinite growth of their ever-increasing profits squeezed from customers paying every month more and more, now and forever, or you'll be taken out and replaced by someone willing to try.

my trans sister said that my look feels like some humanities researcher and I think they were spot on, elilla spring 2026 seems to be unconsciously imitating our Japanology teachers from São Paulo. we'd be doing even more layered patterns and colours too if we could afford to spend on fashion this spring.

(then my polycule told me "yes that looks like a researcher… from Monster Hunter")

> Windows 12 soll ohne KI-Chip nicht voll funktionieren

there will be a lot of people from the Third World and from non-tech professions who will be forced to turn to Linux for sheer lack of options. there already was an upsurge with Windows 11 refusing to run on older computers and it will get worse. the Linux community is *not* up to the task of welcoming non-tech people and helping them figure out stuff. if we don't want ChatGPT to be the default Linux teacher, it is up to us Linux users on the margins of mainstream tech culture to be friendly to new users, and help them with this OS's gratuitous, excessive complexity to do things that are not programming computers.

*edit*: Microsoft is denying rumours of Windows 12 being AI-focused or coming out soon
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/no-an-ai-focused-windows-12-is-not-coming-this-year-false-report-gets-the-facts-completely-wrong

they are currently in damage control mode over Win 11 but the damage control mode is about "reducing AI bloat", which shows even when trying to do PR they're out of touch with why people are angry with Win 11 ("reducing AI bloat" is like a paint manufacturer saying "we're making the lead paint easier to swallow"). given that Win 11 continues to only work with whitelisted CPUs, Secure Boot, a TPM 2.0 chip etc. and MS shows no sign of going back on *that*, the overall point still applies, but for Windows 11; we don't know yet how bad its successor will be, or when will it be out.

camelot: celebrates christmas
The Green Knight: hark! I propose a game for our merriment. whosoever gives me a blow, I shall return it and give him a blow afterwards 👀
The Green Knight: (kneels 💦 )
Sir Gawain: (decapitates him)
The Green Knight: dude

while away from social media I started this series on the history of early yuri games:

Part 1: The NEC PC-88/Sharp/MSX porn game era
https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/early-gl-yuri-lesbian-games-part-1-pc-88-porn-era

Part 2: The 90s console era, aka "my long-ass analysis of Asellus/White Rose from SaGa Frontier"
https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/early-gl-yuri-lesbian-games-part-2-the-console-era

if you have any contributions on this topic and want them to be featured in the articles, please do tell!

#yuri

Leute, die gerne sparsam reisen: welche Art von Essen nehmt ihr in eurem Rucksack mit? (bitte nur vegane Vorschläge)

the other day I was chatting about the state of the world with someone I had just barely met, and they said something like, "I know we have just barely met and maybe it's weird of me to say this but I'll say it anyway: if things go bad and you ever need a place to stay in my country, for any reason, you can stay at my flat."

and they meant it too, and I thought like: this is what I want to hear from cis folk. that's the right thing to say. this shows me that someone 1) is not turning away from what's going on, 2) is not in denial, 3) understands the stakes, has the correct priorities.

I don't expect I'll have to take them on that offer because I have comrades and a good support network and if I ever get deported or need to lay low I'm reasonably confident I would find help on this continent. that's not the case for many trans people, especially the younger ones. a lot of us get thrown out by our families and have absolutely nowhere to turn to; I adopted a couple of those myself. there's a reason why the antifascist podcast "It Could Happen Here" adopted as a slogan "put a trans woman on your couch". this also applies to Latinx immigrants in the USA and any other such situations, of which examples abound.

clew.lol – fash scum instance, users have been spamming pathetic attempts at harassment like it was still 2010 and anybody still cared about 4chan-ass 5th grade slurs

#fediblock

PSA for anyone who missed this that Persona, the age verification system used by Discord, Linkedin, Roblox, ChatGPT, and (in the UK) Reddit, is a USA-hosted service backed financially by Peter Thiel.

I try not to post like "haha look at the funny mess the chatbot made" because it got old long ago, and posting nonsense from the nonsense generators ends up increasing interest in them.

but I'll make an exception for this Github graph because it was live on learn.microsoft.com until people started mocking it
https://web.archive.org/web/20260216165612/https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/introduction-to-github/3-components-of-github-flow

as usual with this kind of brain-rotting cognitive hazard, the longer you stare at it the more your neurons give up and die.

what I'm thinking about is for how many years now they have been promising that just one more datacenter will fix the "hallucinations". AI is going well

I like letters like å, ł, ç or ã where they just draw out the historical sound change for you in a convenient graphical format.

German äöü are like that too once you learn that the modifier is not the Latin trema but an abbreviation of aͤ oͤ uͤ , on account of "e" in Fraktur reducing easily to two short vertical strokes. sadly after Hitler killed Fraktur the graphical transparency was lost.

so I invited daughter to watch ep. 3 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, but due to adhd I got distracted and ca. 21:30 my lisdex wore off and I rembered I didn't eat anything all day, so by the time I was ready to watch it it was 22h.

and because of Sunday insomnia I was already sleepy but I called her anyway.

I was still worried that I was pressuring her to watch this but by the time we reached the cliffhanger at the end she was like, "welp, I think 2 episodes per day is a good pace, I'm going to go make a snack…" 😌 every episode is ~40min so we just finished ep. 4 now, I'm secretly super sleepy but it was worth it

so Adafruit proudly posted about using Gemini to design hardware after, by their own admission, "using LLMs for years to do software and firmware assistance".
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/14/heres-our-first-gemini-deep-think-llm-assisted-hardware-design/

when hit with the inevitable backlash you'd expect from anyone with a working moral compass, Mr. Adafruit (Phillip Torrone) blamed (checks notes) the misogyny of Mastodon reply guys, because clearly the backlash is all due to the fact that Limor Fried (his married partner) shared the blog.

hey watch this, I can weaponise oppression olympics too, I'm a trans woman from the third world: fuck off with profiteering from your selling out to the planet-destroying plagiarism machine that's proudly empowering ICE and the IDF. it's not your country that will pay the price for your meaningless carbon output to generate nonsense until it looks right. and you brag about it. pega teu fascism-assisted hardware design e enfia no cu. happy never to be an adafruit customer again. assholes.

r: I wonder what our vtuber model would b—
e: succubus
r: let's at least think for a bit ok, consider the possibilities—
e: pink succubus. pink-skinned pink-haired demongirl succubus
r: what about jaguar anthro or octopus mermaid or—
e: succubus :>

日本の固有果物ってあるのかな :thounking:

HEA: caju em alemão é Cashewapfel/Kaschuapfel. "maçã de caju".

se vc falar só "caju" as pessoas vão assumir castanha de caju (Cashewnuss/Cashewkerne, ou Kaschu-). faz sentido já que a maioria dos gringos nunca viu um caju, mas castanha de caju é comum. (suco de caju tem mas tipo, importado em mercado "étnico".) mas "maçã" é zoeira

things about being elder millenial/xenial (early 1980s)

- you grew up experiencing the analog world, then was an earlier adopter of the digital world
- therefore you are forever pining for what was lost of the analog lifestyle, *and* the free Internet. it's a transition generation, the lifestyle equivalent of being an immigrant; you feel like you've been in different lands for so long you can't fit in any of them anymore.
- you started work right before 2008. this shapes how you feel about work. the system is rigged and any impression of stability is a lie. you don't trust anything. prepper generation.
- you grew up in the end of history, then saw history resurrect the fuck back. this has the same effect.

in the reality where kurt cobain got to transition and be a lesbian power couple with courtney none of this would have happened

elilla& top scenes without context:

3. that time I hooked up with the US Army and the US Army was a cute sheepgirl

2. that time a subby catgirl said she was happy she could date me because I wasn't radical like her ex from the MLPD and I took offence at the notion that anarchists are in any way less violent than tankies and after three hours of arguments managed to convince her we qualify as an armed threat to the state, at which point she broke up because she was the state

1. that time I very probably ended up listed as a terrorist in the SIS due to posting a feminisation meme about Ikari Shinji in a maid dress

[ ] touched grass today
[×] wrote an entire game about touching grass today

one of my lovers sent this to me, correctly:

> If you feel like reading a short detective noir story about a pathetic lesbian vampire being tasked by a fledgling to rescue her sire from the main character's serial killer ex-girlfriend you should check this out! https://mzakharuk.itch.io/appetite

> Every character is a lesbian and highly problematic in all the best ways

she already had me at "detective noir", and then every sentence kept making it better :blobcatsurprised:

hey, I bet there must be pokémon go-esque "go outside" games in the genre of pen&paper solo journaling zine games on itch :thinknyan: let's go see?

today I got to gorge on waldberry pie and chocolate and pink cinnamon rolls. I didn't even need to make microwave muffins 😌

what if I go and make some microwave muffins tho :blobcatupsidedown:

saw an argument that since the Jade Emperor (the Ruler of the Divine Bureaucracy, the Most Exalted Heavenly Venerable Who Grants Pardon of Sins, the Heavenly Grandfather) took 1750 lives of 129600 years each to attain Golden Immortality and 100 million years more of Taoist cultivation to achieve Jade-Emperorhood, that means he was born a mortal 327 million years ago, which places him at the Palaeozoic era. the Jade Emperor is therefore a Carboniferous specimen, probably a tetrapod amphibian

Portuguese uses two different verbs for the copula "to be", ser and estar. ser is used for relatively permanent traits like "I am a Portuguese speaker", while estar is used for temporary traits like "I am sleepy right now".

however "to be dead" uses temporary "estar" and not permanent "ser". that's because Portuguese speakers are necromancers