Gin Valentine
LightNews LightNews
banner
chekhovsgundam.bsky.social
Gin Valentine
@chekhovsgundam.bsky.social
1.7K followers 390 following 6K posts
🏳️‍⚧️ Aspiring kitchen witch, true trans soul redhead, permanent teacher's pet
She/her. Australian, but a woman once insisted I had an English accent for some reason.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Gin Valentine
grogsgamut.bsky.social
Ahead of Day 3 of the "pink test"

In 2022-23 the McGrath foundation spent about $8.8m on “foundation-funded breast care nurses”, but more than $9.1m on fundraising and marketing, and a further $2.2m on administration."
www.thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2024...
The Pink Test is a feel-good story, but does it help where it’s really needed? | The New Daily
www.thenewdaily.com.au
January 5, 2026 at 10:43 PM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
thatingrid.bsky.social
Inner North Melbourne people: two of Yarra Library's branches have extended opening hours on Thursday and Friday so that you can hide away from the heatwave.
January 6, 2026 at 4:59 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
jeremycorbyn.bsky.social
The story of US intervention is a story of suffering, misery and chaos. How many more catastrophic failures will it take before we learn the lesson?

My piece for @tribunemagazine.bsky.social on the illegal invasion of Venezuela.

tribunemag.co.uk/2026/01/star...
Starmer’s Passivity on Venezuela is Cowardice
Keir Starmer’s evasiveness towards Donald Trump’s assault on Venezuela is a clarifying example of Britain’s ‘special relationship’ of unthinking submission to the White House’s interests.
tribunemag.co.uk
January 6, 2026 at 10:07 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
roodypatooti.bsky.social
Wish I could internalize this
brightwanderer I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned "forever" into the only acceptable definition of success. Like... if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it's a "failed" business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don't actually want to keep doing that, you're a "failed" writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it's a "failed" marriage. The only acceptable "win condition" is "you keep doing that thing forever". A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a "real" friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a "phase" - or, alternatively, a "pity" that you don't do that thing any more. A fandom is "dying" because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things. I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it's okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success... I don't think that's doing us any good at all.
October 30, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
josie.zone
My essay is about Tarantino, yes, but it's also about the ugliness of the "Face of Jewish Vengeance" since WW2:

flaminghydra.com/inglourious-...
The titular commandos in Inglourious Basterds have a habit of carving swastikas on the foreheads of those Nazis whom they allow to live for one reason or another. The idea behind this practice, as described by Lt. Aldo Raine in the film (the Basterds’ Gentile commander, who claims Native American ancestry, played by Brad Pitt), is that these Nazis might someday try to pretend they’d sat out the war, or even that they were part of the Resistance—and the Basterds won’t abide such lies. Here, then, is a fantasy of easy identification: wouldn’t it make life easier if all the world’s fascists had to identify themselves as such in public? Doesn’t it disturb you that they lurk in the shadows? (And isn’t this starting to sound like Nazi propaganda with the roles reversed?) Well, there was a time when Nazis really were easy to identify. In 1944, you just had to go to Germany; toss a stone and you’d hit a Nazi. But in those days there were Jews who wanted to do more than toss stones. Abba Kovner was a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania. Herded into the Vilna Ghetto after the German invasion, Kovner—already an ardent socialist—organized a formidable resistance force across a network of European ghettos. Later, he led a band of Jewish guerillas known as the Avengers (“Nokmim” in Hebrew), who struck Nazi installations and disappeared into the forests. The Avengers were one of the few groups in the real-life war who even come close to resembling Tarantino’s Basterds, and Kovner’s actions under the Nazi occupation were, for the most part, easy to justify. After the war, however, Kovner’s story got more complicated. In 1945, he and some fellow survivors of Hitlerian terror formed a group called simply, Revenge (“Nakam”). They concocted a plan, terrifying in its simplicity and overwhelming in its symbolism. They aimed to poison the wells of Germany. Hundreds of years earlier, Jews in Germany had been blamed for any number of disasters, including plagues, which Christians sometimes blamed on Jews poisoning wells. The well-poisoning Jew became a common piece of iconography in medieval Mitteleuropa. Kovner aimed to turn the old antisemitic lie on its ear: he and his group really would drop poison into the water supplies of German cities. They hoped to take millions of lives, exacting a price more or less equal to the one paid by the Jews of Europe. Kovner had long been a passionate and involved Zionist, and he obtained cans of water-soluble poison from a pair of fellow Jewish militants based in postwar Palestine, Ephraim and Aharon Katzir. Kovner smuggled the poison out of British-held Palestine, but was intercepted by British authorities while trying to get to Europe. The plan never went into effect. Think to yourself for a moment: If you’d lived in the immediate wake of Germany’s enthusiastic mass murder of six million Jews (and many millions of others), would you really blame a few Jews for wanting to take out millions of unreconstructed Nazis? Trouble is, those deaths would have only perpetuated the cycle of violence. Wanting revenge feels pure (as many Tarantino movies will tell you); achieving it brings the world crashing down around our ears (here, Tarantino is less clear-eyed). Luckily for the Germans of the postwar period, that particular dilemma remained entirely hypothetical. Unluckily for the Palestinians, the days of well-poisoning were only beginning. When the United Kingdom began its withdrawal from the troublesome colony of Palestine in 1947, a civil war erupted between its Jewish and Palestinian residents. When the Brits left entirely the following year, the civil war turned into an international one, between the newly declared Jewish State and its Arab neighbors. Palestinian residents of the territory Israel sought to claim were no longer welcome in their own land. During what is known as the Nakba (Arabic for “Catastrophe”), some 700,000 or more Palestinians were forced out of the lands they had inhabited for centuries. But displacement was only part of the story; death came too. And sometimes, it came from the water. According to recently unearthed Israeli documents from the 1948 War, Israeli war heroes Moshe Dayan and Yigael Yadin, among others, authorized and executed Operation Cast Thy Bread, which was a rather simple form of terrorist attack. They dropped poison into the wells of Palestinian villages. The Katzir brothers developed the poison. One of them, Ephraim, later became president of Israel. It is unknown how many Palestinians perished or were sickened. The entire operation was covered up for nearly 80 years. The news of it, published in 2022, barely caused a ripple in the already fierce debate over Israel and the Palestinians. Then that ripple was overwhelmed by the tidal wave that crashed ashore on October 7, 2023.
January 6, 2026 at 8:08 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
wwxwashere.bsky.social
January 6, 2026 at 8:38 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
varshayajman.bsky.social
Several parts of Australia are likely to face the worst heatwaves since the 2019/2020 bushfires.

Volunteers and underpaid frontline workers will step up to help communities.

Meanwhile, in just one year, the Australian government gave $14.9 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel producers and users.
January 6, 2026 at 6:01 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
captainacab.airbud.website
the annoying little jokes will continue until morale improves, and then keep going after that too
January 6, 2026 at 2:25 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
anatosaurus.bsky.social
If you want to know who took all of your money, it's the people with all of the money. Famously, we know that's people working in child care.
January 2, 2026 at 8:53 PM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
tomquinn.bsky.social
"eSafety has been active in cracking down on non-consensual sexual imagery generators...

Despite this, Musk’s Grok has not faced any consequences in Australia despite being far more prominent than any other nudify application and the well-publicised nature of its sexual image generation features."
January 6, 2026 at 4:58 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
ladyemily.nebula.tv
I’m still not sure which Knives Out film I like the most, but I think I feel pretty confident in saying the Louise phone call from Wake Up Dead Man is my favorite scene in the whole trilogy
January 6, 2026 at 3:33 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
kitsuneart.bsky.social
"But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. [...]"

"...There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for."
Illustration by KitsuneArt, limited colour palette (blue and yellow/gold). Frodo and Sam from the Lord of the Rings movie (the Two Towers) standing in the ruins of Osgiliath, holding hands. On top of their heads Sam's words, handwritten by KitsuneArt: "There is some good in this world and it's worth fighting for".
January 3, 2026 at 11:05 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
ironspike.bsky.social
One guy tried, unsuccessfully, to blow up a plane with a bomb in his sneakers, and everybody had to take off their shoes at the airport for the next 20 years.

Chatbots have a collective body count equal to Richard "The Night Stalker" Ramirez, and they're trying to put them in schools.
kashana.blacksky.app Kashana @kashana.blacksky.app · 16h
30 years ago they were like we have to ban song lyrics for the children but it’s full steam ahead for the here’s how to do drugs until you die machine
drewmagary.bsky.social Drew Magary @drewmagary.bsky.social · 21h
“ChatGPT started coaching Sam on how to take drugs, recover from them and plan further binges. It gave him specific doses of illegal substances, and in one chat, it wrote, ‘Hell yes—let’s go full trippy mode’”
www.sfgate.com/tech/article...
January 6, 2026 at 1:37 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
geftokingmongoose.bsky.social
I actually only listen to podcasts at quarter speed I like it when they take 7 hours and sound like a drone metal song
January 6, 2026 at 12:56 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
geauxgabrielle.bsky.social
Video games, rap music, rock and roll, and horror movies have been demonized by the media for YEARS. But ChatGPT gives a how to guide on making CSAM and committing suicide and it’s crickets
drewmagary.bsky.social Drew Magary @drewmagary.bsky.social · 21h
“ChatGPT started coaching Sam on how to take drugs, recover from them and plan further binges. It gave him specific doses of illegal substances, and in one chat, it wrote, ‘Hell yes—let’s go full trippy mode’”
www.sfgate.com/tech/article...
A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT for drug advice. He died from an overdose.
"Who on earth gives that advice?"
www.sfgate.com
January 6, 2026 at 12:23 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
oxinabox.bsky.social
The biggest realisation for most people who transition after the age of 30 is not that they are trans but rather that love can be unconditional.
January 6, 2026 at 12:03 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
emergencybk.bsky.social
Heatwaves are hitting many Australian regions this week, with multiple days 35ºC (95ºF) to 45ºC+ (113ºF+)🥵

There’s ~250 heat related deaths in Australia annually, more than have died in bushfires in last 10 years combined.

Only time it’s ok to CHEAT😉 is during Heatwaves …1/
Heatwaves Only time it's ok to CHEAT C - Check on neighbours, elderly & young, more susceptible to dehydration and heat. H - Hydrate, plenty of water even if you don't feel thirsty, avoid excessive caffeine & alcohol. E - Environment, as cool as you can i.e. stay in shade, few/loose clothes, close curtains, take cold showers/baths if necessary. A - Aware of risks, signs of heat exhaustion & heat stroke (see link in text with post) Nb: There's ~250 heat related deaths in Australia annually, more than have died in bushfires in the last 10 years combined. T - Take Action - use/visit air-conditioned locations (friends, libraries, shopping centres etc), know when to call for medical help.
January 6, 2026 at 12:44 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
angelic.style
how do u repair the social fabric how do you get people to start trusting each other again
January 6, 2026 at 12:46 AM
chekhovsgundam.bsky.social
I almost knocked myself out making pasta
hillarymonahan.bsky.social Hillary Monahan @hillarymonahan.bsky.social · 21h
What's the most ridiculous way you ever hurt yourself? I got out of the tub, skidded in water and tripped over the toilet. Ankle sprain.

😅
January 6, 2026 at 1:40 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
phoenixofgrunvale.bsky.social
"A History of Warner Bros. Through Mergers"

Because no one else would make it, I decided to. Yoicks, and away! #WarnerBros #Netflix #VideoEditing
January 5, 2026 at 3:27 AM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
spicymancer.bsky.social
Expressing affection can be challenging sometimes, but it's always appreciated. 💖 💛
January 5, 2026 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
onlycans.bsky.social
transphobia is good and fine. unless cis people catch strays, at which point it is a tragedy.
January 5, 2026 at 2:03 PM
Reposted by Gin Valentine
gbbranstetter.bsky.social
Incredibly disappointing how frequently I see trans women chased off the internet for literally nothing and makes me wonder why in god's name I'm voluntarily putting myself at risk
January 5, 2026 at 7:24 PM