riceonrye

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chapter I: "A Parade in Erhenrang"

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Audience member: "Hey John, can you play “Going to Maine”?" John: "No." *Audience laughing*

John: "We’re gonna play a new song again, if that's cool with you. Alright. Thank you. This song is a true story. *laughing* That’s the saddest thing about it. I hope that if you should happen, and if you do, don’t let anybody tell you not to but uh… If you should happen to be having the sort of year I was having when I was seventeen, you may feel free to sing along with the chorus, nobody’s gonna hold it against you. Uh, I know that twice that uh, I *to Peter Hughes* can I out you? This is Peter’s favorite of the new songs I think precisely because of the chorus. *laughs* It’s called “This Year”."

[The first time "This Year" was played live]

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for tlhod secret santa 2024!

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warm girl give me strength

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let’s get one thing clear. im not here to look at your jpgs. i’m not here to learn your username or understand your opinions. i’m here to read the time stamps of your posts to make sure i’m progressing forwards in time

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people who don't follow chess I promise this post is really funny

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Don’t mind me…just thinking about when Lady Silence lifted Irving’s head to put his handkerchief under it as a pillow. The same handkerchief that made Irving realize all women(and humans) all over the world enjoy art and the same handkerchief that symbolizes home. Or whatever.

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Gustav Klimt’s ’“The Kiss” (1908) by = 。= (2009)

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sighs

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I can't stress enough how much the John Green debacle was an early example of how cancel culture and purity culture combine to make people feel righteously justified to engage in harassment.

John Green, during his time on tumblr, committed the heinous sins of...being neurodivergent and talking openly about it, earnestly interacting with fans in a very direct and unfiltered way, and writing about teenagers navigating first love and sexuality while he himself was an adult. The worst things he ever did were be a little cringe or misspeak, for which he was always prompt to apologize (often whether he really needed to or not).

Yet despite the former two being things tumblr claimed to love and the last one being true of 99.99% of YA authors, in this case a large segment of tumblr users steeped in the early 2010s resurgence of purity culture decided that these things were suspicious and predatory, and used that as an excuse to justify some truly awful behavior.

Which is really all that cancel culture is: the normalization and even celebration of the process of misapplying morality or ethics to dehumanize someone for the express purpose of justifying whatever pain and suffering you want to inflict upon them. Basically, deciding "this person is bad, so I am exempt from affording them basic respect and human dignity, and am allowed to cross any and all otherwise uncrossable lines in order to punish them without damaging my own moral or ethical standing."

Contrary to popular tumblr lore, the infamous "cock monologue" was not the sum total of the harassment, or even the worst of it. Callout blogs issued long lists of "receipts" about how terrible John Green was, most if not all of which were either taken out of context or completely refutable. His works were torn to shreds by people who'd never read them, as evidenced by much of the criticism being obviously and blatantly counter to the actual contents of the books.

Not that it mattered. Once the John Green hate party reached a certain level of critical mass, it became less about who he actually was or what he'd done, and more about proving you were a good person by hating him. That's the natural conclusion of cancel culture, after all: virtue signalling by identifying yourself in opposition to the cancelled parties. They're bad, and I'm good, so I hate them! Or, more often: They're bad, and I hate them, so I'm good!

Before it was over with, John Green had been accused, with no evidence, of being everything from a Nazi to a pedophile and subjected to hate mail and death threats. He eventually left the site for the sake of his own mental health, and because he no longer felt comfortable engaging directly with fans in the same way he once had.

Yet even now, with the benefit of hindsight, and even among those who ostensibly reject purity culture and condem bullying and harassment, very few on tumblr take what was done to John Green as seriously as it should be taken or condemn it as thoroughly as it should be condemned. Which I think is something we need to at least consider doing, given the increasing rise of purity and cancel culture online, and given the recent influx of professional creators eager to interact with fans on a more direct level than they have on other social media.

And my concern is not purely, or even primarily, for the Mike Flanagans and Lynda Carters of the world. I'm far more concerned, actually, for the small, independent or self-published creators in this space, and how much even a very small level of visibility gives too many people a feeling of carte blanche to engage in harassment.

I myself have less than 3k followers on here, a handful of popular posts, and zero notoriety or consequence outside of tumblr whatsoever, and I've been repeatedly told to kill myself for saying such innocuous things as "I don't think censorship is the cure for the world's evils" and "maybe learning the history of communities you want to participate in would be a good idea."

Thankfully, all it took for me to stop the harassment that came my way was to block those few individuals. But there have been many instances over the years of small creators or just random tumblr users that got a bit popular being stalked, doxxed, swatted, and harassed to the point of leaving the site and dealing with serious mental health issues as a result. It has never been just John Green. John Green isn't even the worst example. And tumblr has never learned its lesson.

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HAPPY YAOI DAY

No man is that funny

Based on the Kurvitz quote!! :

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i have to finish this essay for uni quickly so that i can gif cardinal tedesco hitting his vape

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Some insectivore (and one rodent) sensory homunculi. The proportionately larger parts represent how much that area is represented in the brain's somatosensory cortex.

From Animal Behavior (2009).

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writing advice for characters with a missing eye: dear God does losing an eyes function fuck up your neck. Ever since mine crapped out I've been slowly and unconsciously shifting towards holding my head at an angle to put the good eye closer to the center. and human necks. are not meant to accommodate that sorta thing.

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estraven delighting in terran hand signs

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Carter Goodrich Russian Bear, cover illustration for Forbes