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i can't believe terry pratchett created the Community pizza gag back in 1989

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if you can’t talk about sex w/o calling it “seggs” or “spicy time” i thimk maybw you should be quiet & keep it to your self .

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we are in a media literacy crisis

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I will never, NEVER understand people who complain about Ao3 search system and how the archive isn't algorithm based. Ao3 is literally the only site that has a decent search system, at this point.

Anytime I need to Google something, I feel like I'm about to lose my mind. I wanted to research the reason why women in my country are more likely to get custody of their children, because all the studies I know about focus on the US and needed to compare them to make an argument, and the best I got were domestic violence stats, an article about a woman committing suicide, and stats about parents with shared custody.

And let's not talk about YouTube! My home page doesn't show any of the youtubers I follow unless I left a video unfinished (but, then again, it'll keep showing me unfinished videos even from people I'm not subscribed to), and the search system is completely fucked. When I write, I like to listen to those lyrics-less playlists titled stuff like "you're the last person after the end of the world," and now searching for them is a pain in the ass.

It doesn't matter how specific I try to get with them to get the results I want, YouTube will always show me a bunch of random playlists that have nothing to do with the keywords I used, will bring up several shorts even if I make sure to opt out of them anytime they pop up in my home feed, and ultimately loop me around to the content I usually consume.

"You typed 'Y2K nostalgiacore with birds'? How about 'Liminal spaces in a Walmart'? No? Okay, let's try 'Life after the nuclear holocaust." No again? Then fuck you, here's a full album of a band now popular on TikTok, twelve shorts that might be related to what you're looking for, and Danny Gonzalez videos. Fuck you."

And people just seem to be okay with this shit! Claim that it's easier! How the fuck is it easier, when you have to type and retype the same shit over and over again in the hope that that one word you decide to add or remove will suddenly change where the site brings you??

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this gets pretty loud be careful

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obsessed with the Willy Wonka Experience, both a lesson in the dangers of AI and an incredible contender for the new dashcon/fyre festival (x)

I feel bad because it was probably families with kids who got scammed but to be fair this is what their website looks like... there were signs (x)

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Due to a misunderstanding, the party gets the Duck of Many Things. Nobody can predict what it does, but occasionally they’ll hear a quack and the fun begins.

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the MEATBALLS menu????? wtaf tumblr

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As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.

I rant approximately once a week about how the brain maturity myth transmuted “Young adults are too poor to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own” into “Young adults are too emotionally and neurologically immature to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own.”

I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .

And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.

Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.

Codependency What it originally referred to: A non-addicted person being overly “helpful” to an addicted partner or relative, often out of financial desperation. For example: Making sure your alcoholic husband gets to work in the morning (even though he’s an adult who should be responsible for himself) because if he loses his job, you’ll lose your home. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/codependency-addiction-recovery.html What it’s been distorted into: Being “clingy,” being “too emotionally needy,” wanting things like affection and quality time from a partner. A way of pathologizing people, especially young women, for wanting things like love and commitment in a romantic relationship.

Compulsory Heterosexuality What it originally referred to: In the 1980 in essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493756 Adrienne Rich described compulsory heterosexuality as a set of social conditions that coerce women into heterosexual relationships and prioritize those relationships over relationships between women (both romantic and platonic). She also defines “lesbian” much more broadly than current discourse does, encompassing a wide variety of romantic and platonic relationships between women. While she does suggest that women who identify as heterosexual might be doing so out of unquestioned social norms, this is not the primary point she’s making. What it’s been distorted into: The patronizing, biphobic idea that lesbians somehow falsely believe themselves to be attracted to men. Part of the overall “Women don’t really know what they want or what’s good for them” theme of contemporary discourse.

Emotional Labor What it originally referred to: The implicit or explicit requirement that workers (especially women workers, especially workers in female-dominated “pink collar” jobs, especially tipped workers) perform emotional intimacy with customers, coworkers, and bosses above and beyond the actual job being done. Having to smile, be “friendly,” flirt, give the impression of genuine caring, politely accept harassment, etc. https://weld.la.psu.edu/what-is-emotional-labor/ What it’s been distorted into: Everything under the sun. Everything from housework (which we already had a term for), to tolerating the existence of disabled people, to just caring about friends the way friends do. The original intent of the concept was “It’s unreasonable to expect your waitress to care about your problems, because she’s not really your friend,” not “It’s unreasonable to expect your actual friends to care about your problems unless you pay them, because that’s emotional labor,” and certainly not “Disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to be visibly disabled in public, because witnessing a disabled person is emotional labor.” Anything that causes a person emotional distress, even if that emotional distress is rooted in the distress-haver’s bigotry (Many nominally progressive people who would rightfully reject the bigoted logic of “Seeing gay or interracial couples upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public” fully accept the bigoted logic of “Seeing disabled or poor people upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public”).

Battered Wife Syndrome What it originally referred to: The all-encompassing trauma and fear of escalating violence experienced by people suffering ongoing domestic abuse, sometimes resulting in the abuse victim using necessary violence in self-defense. Because domestic abuse often escalates, often to murder, this fear is entirely rational and justified. This is the reasonable, justified belief that someone who beats you, stalks you, and threatens to kill you may actually kill you.

What it’s been distorted into: Like so many of these other items, the idea that women (in this case, women who are victims of domestic violence) don’t know what’s best for themselves. I debated including this one, because “syndrome” was a wrongful framing from the beginning – a justified and rational fear of escalating violence in a situation in which escalating violence is occurring is not a “syndrome.” But the original meaning at least partially acknowledged the material conditions of escalating violence.

I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.

What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”

Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”

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Thinking about 13 Latvias again

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Thanks for the shout out because I absolutely hate this tendency. If you've got obsessive fans on Tumblr and Reddit piecing together the clues you put there, then you've done a good job with your foreshadowing and don't have to change anything. You especially don't have to change it to something you just pulled out of your bum at the last minute. That's not a plot twist. It's barely even a plot. It's just screwing over both your viewers and your own writing for no good reason.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?

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Insist the primary distinction between High Elves and Dark Elves is that High Elves aren't here to fuck spiders while Dark Elves are absolutely no questions asked here to fuck spiders.

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Today's aesthetic: when a video game does the YOU DIED thing, but the developers neglected to give the baddies a victory pose, or even provide their AI with any sort of general script for what to do when the player character ceases to be a valid target, so they just keep milling around periodically attacking the air three feet above your character's prone corpse until the screen fades out.

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My favorite thing about Max Caulfield is how she both has far too much internal dialogue and not nearly enough.

If you don't kiss Chloe, Max says it's because "she's not ready for marriage." The overthinking you have to participate in to get to that conclusion is worse than a goat farmer trying to figure out how to keep a fox out of the fence.

But then she gets a text from a sketchy number saying that they're going to destroy the evidence related to Rachel, and Max decides to go to the junkyard??? Under the cover of night??? Without telling anyone else where they were going??? And what would she do even if Nathan was there destroying the evidence?? Ask him politely to surrender to the authorities???

Max has brain cells but sometimes she does not apply them to the proper place.

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This has never been more appropriate:

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People getting mad about Firefox switching to using hardware acceleration for video playback because they think "hardware acceleration" is a form of DRM is basically the browser equivalent of people freaking out because some random social media platform's terms of service says they own your posts, then when you read what the ToS in question actually says it's literally just "you grant us the right to show your posts to other people".