#'don't bother them with your posts when it's something so meaningless as this one'

[starsmuserainbow]

Speech bubble emoji for a shippy thread that mun is fond of?

Let's reminisce...

[[I assume you mixed together this meme and the speech bubble for not being able to talk for a thread? If this was for another older meme or something I'm sorry for not linking the right one - it probably doesn't change what I would answer though, unless that meme did something very different!]]

Hmm, well, I'll be honest, I haven't really had that many shippy threads. I don't know what it is, perhaps my "problem" of needing a longer thing leading to ships usually, or perhaps I'm not writing good enough or perhaps it's because I'm not doing nsfw that shipping doesn't really happen, but yeah, I haven't really had that many threads in the regards yet. I just realized, though, I might simply not quite know what counts as shippy thread and what doesn't? Huh. Now I'm thinking.

Okay, well, for all that I'm gonna mention I could now say 'but I don't think we did any specifically shippy thread so far', so I'm just saying this before and now only just mentioning ships.

I do like the ship that I have currently on Blackfire with Vergil (@darksonofsparda, link to my tag of that url here in case you wanna read up some) a lot, they're very evil cool together and I love them. I'm still thinking about making a tag for them, though I haven't done shippy (nor person-specific) tags before, so I will need to ponder that for a while more.

Then, one of the ships I probably love most of anything I did around my blogs, is Wildfire's things with Hay Lin (@aerokinesiiss, here's a link for the tag again for reading up if you want to). They're just very adorable together, I love writing Ry with Hay Lin, and I just feel like I got so lucky having this chance even rather early-on in my writing for him on here!

RobStar is of course my all time favourite ship and will probably stay that as well, and I'm sure I had some nice threads throughout my years there too, but outside of that one plot that I really wanna write out sometime - which I still assume is kinda 'cursed' though bc whenever I suggest it to someone and we start writing it, they kinda stop being active for various reasons (I'm mostly joking, I know a storyline can't really be the reason for that when it's personal reasons or whatever that makes ppl stop being active) - I don't think there's any thread per se. The first Robin RPer that comes to mind that I did some things with is one who I can't tag anymore bc deactivated, formerwonder, read up on the little bit of stuff we did here. It wasn't that much stuff we did, but I very fondly remember our things.

While I'm at Star, me and @merveiilles also more or less recently (? I think it's been more than a year already, idk why I feel like I should still call that 'recently' oops) started to consider her and Aqualad a ship, which I love a lot too! They had a date-thread sorta before though we didn't actually get to writing the date iirc, and a bunch of very cute asks, but there's nothing I can really link you I think - unless you wanna skim through like all the things we're doing together with is way more than only with Aqualad though.

I'm also doing some really nice things with @featherchan - as Robin and Starfire before too, then we also are somewhat considering Silverwing (an OC of featherchan's) and both Moonshot and Wildfire as potential ships! They're both still in the works though, which I feel like is my fault bc I need long to write a ship well I think or maybe to even feel the ship in the first place or sth idk, but, yes, definitely something else to take note of! To link you one thing for if you wanna read up stuff here too, I'll link you an AU we're playing in, here's the link. It's a fascinating AU in itself, and having the chance to write it with someone and hopefully eventually develop a ship within it too, I really like that. There's more things we did, though, but I don't wanna link you a general tag with too much to look through, so you'd have to check for the url-tag yourself to know more, both on Ry and on Moonshot.

Me and @wafflesandbuttkicking do have plans for Steph and Moonshot, which I love a lot, enough actually to have prompted me to do a drawing for the thread we have (that's still in the beginning though) before, which is very rare! I'm not all too happy with my drawing, but it still means that I clearly absolutely adore the dynamic and later-on-hopefully-ship, and I'm looking very forward to keeping that going. Here's a link to what we have so far, though it isn't that much yet.

Also, honorable mention to the things I wrote out between my Star and my OC Moonshot before - I have a bunch of things (Two things where he's slipped into his evil verse because of his obsession/crush/love for Star here and here, a thing that I wrote for his birthday here, two scenes of him finding her on Earth here and here, and last a drabble of them actually getting together here).

There's probably some more stuff I could add, but honestly, I feel like most of it is still a work in progress and not really having 'shippy threads' yet - or like said, I might simply not know how to count one as it. (Also, I wrote these down as I thought of them, in no way is this a sorting of favouring or the likes.)

[soft-pine]

woke up to these lovely DMs and while I'm of course not going to post this person's account, I am going to respond publicly. (cn discussion of SA)

okay so to preface this, you're somewhat correct. what we are doing - what we are all doing is an interpretive task. objectivity really doesn't exist - on my side or yours. and i'm not claiming it does. i have said and said again and said over again that i'm not trying to exclude or skew things. but sometimes i am simply not going to interpret a scene the way someone else does. and that's okay. please take your own notes! hell copy-paste mine and delete everything you don't like! add whatever you want!

that said, i made these notes with the intention for it to be useful to other people so if it seems like something is categorized wrong or not included, we can talk about it. i've said and said again and said over again that i am open to specific feedback. and where i have received specific feedback, i've made the small changes suggested!

but this is not specific. and honestly is virtually meaningless to me at this point. just because the notes don't sit right with your feelings about the show is not, in and of itself, proof i've missed anything. especially, especially because one of the reasons i made this document is because i saw frequent, unsubstantiated claims get circulated widely and i wanted more information to fall back on. so tell me what i've missed specifically or don't bother.

i'm sorry that you don't like that post. but honestly things can have some fucking layers. do both sam & dean make jokes to each other that make light of SA & demons, yes. are they both men who were raised in a misogynistic culture and have better and worse moments at treating each other and those around them with respect, yes. do i fucking hate meg and wish she would stop assaulting both of them, YES!

was i pointing out that there is a pattern of dean thinking about femininity and women and being embodied as a woman, yeah. it's not like i cannot engage with that comment in multiple ways. it's not like it's not in my notes.

but also like i don't go search up posts about sam's gender by people who are primarily interested in sam and say how their post is shitty to or diminishing of or not fully accounting for everything dean has experienced. that would be a waste of my time and theirs. i'm sorry i didn't talk enough about waffles in my post about pancakes but you're not in an ihop. you're in my kitchen right now. i make pancakes. we are eating pancakes.

but i take issue with again and again. point me to it. show me where dean does this again and again? like i am genuinely asking what am i missing. where is the repeated mocking? tell me what episode, what scene and i will add it to my notes and my understanding. heck! if you don't have that information, i'd take a gifset or a sam-centric meta post and put the puzzle pieces together myself.

i don't know what to tell you. these notes were compiled over the course of over a year and two full supernatural rewatches plus some. i am currently rewatching supernatural. i am never not watching supernatural. i am never not taking notes.

and i fully own my dean-centric POV. that's not gonna change. but that doesn't mean that as i was watching the show, side-by-side with the transcript page open, rewinding and double-checking and adding notes, that i was just leaving things out willy-nilly that didn't fit into my view. honestly, when i started these notes (primarily to record how sam & dean articulated their feelings about john), i didn't expect a lot of these categories to turn out this way. i don't need them to be like this to love dean and i was and am open to corrections that change these numbers. but you have to tell me what they are. and not just claim they simply must exist.

now on to this. honestly if you've been even an ounce as careful looking over my notes as i was making them, you'd find that a lot of the dialogue about possession being like SA comes from dean. that is not to say that i don't think that's how sam experienced it or that he can't feel it without saying it aloud or that fans can't interpret that that is how he is likely feeling.

but don't come here and tell me i need to consider this when i fucking marked down all the times in season 5 that dean compares the prospect of michael possessing him to rape. when i watched the scene in 14.03 when dean undresses the clothes michael dressed him in. when this is like one of the main themes of my main fic. like you don't know me. dont come on my blog and scroll down far enough to find a post you hate and then tell me you can somehow know all my thoughts on a topic that post wasn't even about.

i have never claimed that dean is being victimized by sam. if that's what you get from my notes that honestly says more about you than me.

and that's the real issue isn't it. i simply must be so biased but you all... all the people yelling at me that i've missed so much are, what... not engaged in an interpretive task with inherent imperfections and bias?

i am trying to be as honest, open, correctable, and sincere as i can about this but i don't have to skew my document until the numbers look right to you.

[alittlefrenchtree]

I'm against any kind of hatred towards Nick because he "hates rwrb" because obviously that's not the case but I don't understand why we can't even express legitimate perplexity in the way he completely ignored (on social media) everything related to the film including the announcement of the sequel.

Today he will definitely announce the new project and ok, that's right, it's his job but isn't the sequel his project as well? Why doesn't that project deserve the same space on his socials? I don't understand why we can't talk about it in any way because we are immediately attacked by the throat and there is not the slightest possibility of exchanging an opinion and understanding.

ok, this one is polite and i’m too weak to resist talking about marketing stuff so i’ll bite.

Because there is nothing to talk about? Nick’s social media and instagram accounts are exclusively dedicated to promote what he has to promote (and also trying to be in Arsenal’s good graces, free tickets and all access invitations) and believe it or not, there is rules to follow with social media management.

Without talking about a ban or an exclusivity, there is still a schedule to follow when you promote something, similar projects on the same plateform and general logic about what you’re posting and when. When you share something, there is a goal to achieve. Remind your audience of a release date. Remind them they have your movie on their watch list and need to watch it (again). Lead them to like a post, to watch a trailer. Poke your favorite football so they notice you and give you stuff. Show to the people who are hiring actors to do stuff that you might not be a big name just yet but you’re hanging out with them and know how to wear expansive watch as well.

Breaking news, actor’s personal feelings is rarely on the list. Fan service for the pure purpose of fan service either (at least not in this case).

So regarding of the sequel, right now there is nothing to promote? Not a release date, not a teaser of a teaser of a teaser, not a visual (the generic ugly thing made in 5 minutes on canva.com isn’t a proper visual) not even the beginning of a shooting date. You don’t promote something when there is nothing to promote. The announcement was early, given that they had nothing to say about it except for Matthew and Casey writing it together. So it’s was mainly for fans. It doesn’t need Nick’s audience’s boost to spread the news because everybody who cares about rwrb (and also their grandmas) already know about the sequel. And there is nothing more to do at this point since there is nothing more to sell. Would it make sense if you were asking why there isn’t any billboard out there promoting the sequel? Like to say what? They didn’t even share a year for the movie. Not even a title 😭 So far it’s only a fan news.

So no, I don’t understand the perplexity (and even less the worse takes i’ve read out there). If you already know he cares about rwrb and its sequel, why would you need the validation of a random story or a random post?

That should be an opportunity for you and everybody who shares your feelings on that to ask yourself about what meaningless social media management bother you so much. That would be a more interesting question. Maybe it could help you make some of your relationships with people a bit healthier.

Took this one because i had free time on my hands while commuting, but i’m on my way to eat delicious food and next time i’ll have that much free time and energy on my hands will be in 9572847 business days so we’ll see if i’ll answer on any follow up on this conversation. Take care xx 💜 (and don’t forget to celebrate Nick’s announcement!! still on the Knives Out 3 boat personally)

[dokidokitsuna]

...I just remembered I wanted to make my own statement on the AI thing. ^^;

So you've probably heard, but in case you haven't: Tumblr just sold out everyone's data to the AI trash compactors, they probably did it long before they gave us the option to opt out, and even if you do opt out they're probably still taking and using your work anyway (telling people to opt out instead of actually asking for their permission is already scummy business practice, but when it comes to AI it's functionally meaningless. :/ It's always "well, we're telling them not to use these people's data and we're hoping they'll be nice and go along with it" with no regulations or consequences if they decide to just steal everything indiscriminately...)

Despite that, I am not leaving Tumblr anytime soon. I'm looking into other sites*, but at this moment in time, I have nowhere else to go. ^^; Besides, I still like it here. When I left DeviantArt I was already getting sick of the place, having my art stolen regularly by "fans" and paradoxically getting less and less interest in my work over time. By the time the devs turned the website into eye-blinding slop with Eclipse, I was more than ready to move on.

But I still enjoy using Tumblr. I like writing long text posts that no one would bother to read anywhere else, I like answering asks, and I like the unique sense of humor and style among the users here. ^^ It would take a lot to force me out.

Also, I can take a little solace in the fact that AI-bros do not value "low-quality" art like mine. ^^; If messy cel-shaded sketches with visible pixels ever become popular, then I'll worry, but for now I think it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to wholesale regurgitate my art. If anything, I think prioritizing it in their datasets would only make them worse...and on that note, if you do have "high quality" detailed/painterly/semi-realistic art that would be targeted, I'd recommend 'poisoning' it with Nightshade/Glaze. Although I heard a rumor a while back that AI is "building immunity" to Nightshade and already learning to work around it, but I'm really hoping that was just a wishful lie from the trash compactors themselves. I haven't heard it repeated since then, so I think it's still worth a shot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So anyway, like the post I reblogged said, I think the best thing we can do now is to make it clear that WE DON'T WANT AI ART. We don't care how easy it'll be to instantly generate thousands of hours of mindless 'content' to look at; we don't want it. Since regulation is lagging so far behind (wanna know why Disney's copyright hounds didn't shut this down on sight? Most likely, they're hoping to profit from it down the line) the only way to fight this right now is with individual litigation and consumer demand.

Don't support projects made with AI**; don't hate-watch them or spotlight them. Focus your energy on the millions of human artists who are still here, and need your support now more than ever.

*I've heard people mention moving to Twitter and/or Artstation: fam, you're jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. ^^;;; IIRC, Arstation was one of the FIRST art sites to start flirting with AI, and Twitter has been selling off its users' data for several months already. Go there if you must, but don't go under the impression that it's "safer".

**Please keep a cool head when discussing AI art, and keep in mind that it used to mean something other than "mass theft". Artists have and still do create AI tools that are built on limited data sets with permission/compensation, that are used to aid them in their work and encourage human artistry (Vocaloids and DAW's, for instance) rather than stamp it out. Until a specific word evolves into popular use for exploitative AI, we're kinda stuck with this confusion, so remember to get the facts before you speak out.

P.S. Praying every night that this is a dumb fad that will soon die and go to the same hell as NFTs. >_< Praying every morning that the influx of AI art into its own datasets will eventually corrupt itself and make it useless. >_< >_< Praying every afternoon for both at once! >_< >_< >_< Like to charge, reblog to cast, all that

[4dkellysworld]

she eventually had to do what her teacher ada did as well

She did all she could,just as you and other bloggers are doing

There's only so much to point to,you can't do it for people,you can only point to the direction

But do not put her on a pedestal,she manged to realize herself with a couple of posts,why can't you?

That's the reason she left probably,that we stop seeking for validation and look within

Stop accusing other bloggers as well

Even If someone is hypothetically saying something mean,just let them?why does it matter?is their ego made of gold and therefore meaning more than the others? it's meaningless .have you learned nothing from her?...

Just look within

Thank you Kelly for keeping her posts,I really appreciate it❤️

Exactly. For those who genuinely want to know their Self deeply and completely, forget about what others are/might be saying, forget what's going on around you. It can be easy to get caught up in the noise but don't bother with it, it's all maya. Just stick with your chosen teacher (preferably one that you trust is fully realized like Lester, Robert, Nisargadatta, Siddharameshwar and that you resonate with) and forget about everything else.

Here's some words from Robert Adams that may be relevant:

You say you want to become free. You say you wish to awaken, become liberated, why does it take so long? Why do I have to go through this life? And go through all the various things that I go through? Take an honest look at yourself. Do you have humility? Do you have compassion? Do you have love? Or do you have anger, fear, hatred? You have to honestly take a good look at your life. See the kind of life you've been living. What are your beliefs? What do you feel about the world, the universe, your self? 1

Now, if you really want to make progress, you will drop everything mentally. I’m referring to mentally letting go of your reactions to whatever is going on in your body and the world. Leave the world alone. Leave people alone. Do not try to change people. Or to make them see your point of view. There is no point of view. Every point of view is wrong. We want to get rid of points of view. 2

If you’d only learn to sit still, to be quiet, to stop reacting to the universe, to the world, to the situations, to life. We have names for everything. What if we forgot about those names? And we stopped seeing things as something? What if we just observed things, watched things, without giving them a name, without coming to a conclusion? What do you think would happen? You would transcend everything. 3

You’re trying to correct something. You’re trying to become something. You’re trying to do something. And something does not exist. Also, what you’re trying to correct does not exist. What you’re trying to change does not exist. You get nowhere. This is why I tell you so often, leave everything alone. Have no opinion for or against. Do not be judgmental. Be nothing and you’ll be everything. The only thing that you should do or must do, is not to be in conflict with anything. Do not be in conflict with anyone or anything. When you’re not in conflict with anything, the mind begins to surrender itself and goes back into the Heart, and you become your Self. 4

The water in the mirage, that is maya; something that appears to be real, but upon investigation you find it's not. The whole world is like that. The whole universe is like that. Do not be fooled again. Do not take anything seriously. Turn within. Do not react. And vehemently make up your mind to go deeper this time, and not get lost in maya again. 5 I am saying continue what you're doing but mentally give up everything. Mentally do not become attached to things by fearing them or loving them or doing anything to them at all. You observe the world and your affairs. You watch what is happening to you. 1

[lingeringscars]

i lied one more post but not about layla.

shauna does not speak enough. in the adult timeline, all she really does is speak, but it's meaningless. shauna is known for bottling things up and repressing them and acting like everything is fine. shauna then gets mad at people, namely jeff and jackie, for not being able to read her mind. she resents them.

shauna is full of resentment. resentment towards jackie for not truly seeing her or ever asking what she wanted out of life, just assuming that it would be her and what she wanted. resentment towards jackie for dying (yes, it is true). resentment towards jeff for trapping her in a life (a life that she did, in fact, choose btw). resentment towards jeff for making her have not one but two children. resentment towards callie for daring to be alive.

and none of this comes out. (it also seems like callie is the only one that truly feels that? also shauna's most vocal resentment is directed towards callie in general. i don't even like my daughter. [not as sentimental as your hubby?] . back when she was cute. etc etc etc).

shauna does not talk and expects people to just understand what she is feeling, holding it against them when they keep doing what they are doing, but they have no reason to suspect that they've done anything wrong! (and it's really not from a people pleasing standpoint, either. i don't think shauna cares very much if jackie or jeff like her, she's not swallowing herself to make herself more palatable. it's not really Like that. she does have shame. i don't really know what is driving this, it's just Her).

now to my point <3 she DOES talk to tai. one reason why feeling like tai is betraying her hits so hard is because tai might be the one person on the planet that shauna actually talks to. she has fake niceties with nat (that burning resentment going into season 3 for her being crowned antler queen is going to be...interesting), misty, and others, but she won't fake anything with tai. she's miserable, she's cranky, she's everything that she actually feels. she tells tai the truth, she tells tai the ugly truth, and when she keeps things from tai, it bothers them both. when she lies to tai, it bothers her.

she says that tai is supposed to be on her side, and that is something that has stuck with them. shauna didn't choose to go to the lake to stick it to jackie or prove a point, that is true. but it's also true that shauna was on tai's side re: allie, re: the lake, even re; the expedition. shauna has been on tai's side, and she expected that in return (and she never lost that, but tai didn't exactly act the way shauna wanted her to, even if she was clearly still on shauna's side. see: jackie).

shauna actually divulges information to tai, and she is upset what that is not reciprocated or does not feel reciprocated. tai may be the only person on the planet that shauna does not deeply resent because of this.

[isnt-it-pretty]

WIP #3

I actually plan to finish this one eventually, although I'm not sure when it will happen, so I figured I'd post it.

This is Kaveh and Cyno's first meeting in my childhood friends au!

...

The boy is small where he stands half-hidden behind his guardian, fingers clinging to Professor Cyrus' robes as the adults chat in the doorway of his home. Kaveh can only see a glimpse of his red eyes peeking out from behind the fabric. 

His parents warned him not to get too excited even as Kaveh practically vibrated with anticipation. Cyno is shy, they said, and not used to other children. He doesn't like to be touched so make sure to keep your hands to yourself.

All Kaveh heard was that his potential new playmate is lonely-- a feeling he knows well. 

Very few of Kaveh's peers understand his drawings of pretty buildings or why he bothers using such specific colours on the flowers that surround them instead of doing whatever he wants. He needs the aesthetic to be just right, while his peers prefer rainbows that don't match at all. They think he's odd because of it, and Kaveh wonders if Cyno will think the same. He hopes not-- it would be nice to have a friend. 

The adults move into the sitting room and Kaveh gets his first real look at Cyno as they sit on plush sofas across from one another. His first impression of Cyno being small was true-- he's only a year younger than Kaveh, but he looks even younger. Maybe it's the thinness of his limbs, how short he is, or the way he shrinks back under the adults' attention like he's afraid somebody will hurt him. The sight makes something protective well up in Kaveh's chest. He doesn't like the idea of Cyno being so afraid in his own home, and hates that he might be part of the cause.

Cyrus has tea and treats laid out on the low table set between the two families. He passes Cyno a piece of Kalakand wrapped in a napkin, who accepts it with the quietest thank you Kaveh has ever heard. The square milk-based sweet is messy, but Kaveh loves it, and eagerly takes one when offered. 

Across from him, Cyno eats in silence. His white hair falls before his eyes, obscuring his features. Kaveh picks at his own treat, thinking. 

The entire reason he's here is because Cyno doesn't have many friends. Since he and Kaveh are the same age, their parents decided to introduce them, but Cyno doesn't seem very interested in the idea. It makes Kaveh's stomach twist uncomfortably. What is wrong with him that nobody wants to be his friend?

"Cyno," Cyrus eventually says. His voice is soft, like when Kaveh tries talking to one of the stray cats that live in his neighbourhood. "Why don't you show Kaveh your bedroom? I'm sure he'd like to see your books."

Cyno's head snaps up, his eyes full of abject panic as he stares at his guardian. Kaveh wants to tell him that it's okay, he doesn't have to if he doesn't want to be friends. He doesn't get the chance before his mother pushes him forward, a mirror to Cyrus' gentle urging. 

Eventually, Cyno gives in. He stares at the floor, shoulders tense, and quietly leads Kaveh from the room as the adults' conversation slowly picks up again, the topics light and meaningless. Kaveh can't help but wonder if it's because he and Cyno were there, and whether the discussion will turn more serious when they're out of earshot. Adults dislike talking about certain topics around children, even though Kaveh is eleven now. 

The house is smaller than Kaveh's, and not as clean. It makes sense. Kaveh has both his parents to maintain the house, while Cyno only has Cyrus. He wonders if it's lonely without a mother. 

He knows Cyno is adopted. His parents told him before they came so that he wouldn't be surprised that Cyno and Cyrus don't look the same. Now, Kaveh can only wonder where he came from. His dark skin and white hair are unusual in Sumeru, but Kaveh's parents warned him against asking personal questions. Part of Kaveh wants to ignore that advice. Cyno looks uncomfortable, though, so he doesn't ask. 

Cyno is silent as he walks, his feet not making any sound. He doesn't look back to make sure Kaveh is following, but his shoulders are tense as he listens. It makes Kaveh feel loud. 

They enter a small room. It's smaller than Kaveh's own, but his house is bigger. It certainly has fewer books, though. There's a shelf against one wall full of volumes. Some are leatherbound, others are held together but glue and twine, or have colourful covers. They didn't come from the same source; Cyrus must have worked hard to find them all. Kaveh even recognizes some of the titles, although he doesn't read often. The Akademiya is discouraging it in favour of leaning more on the Akasha. His parents don't like that decision, but they haven't explained why.   

[necronatural]

oh it goin DOWN on twitter

sorry for mobhundred discourse and also making this a little about me. #testimonials.

I've been staying out of it because of overlapping circles & callout posts being incendiary but I always disliked SC in a "this person is unlikable" way, didn't do anything but be self-righteous and overly sensitive. like

I'd DM my friend shit she says with her name cropped out to go "LOL", making sure not to name her because no one should be put on blast for being annoying. But "that includes telling someone to explode" is objectively funny as fuck

overall I interpreted all the sketchy stuff in the fic as like general incompetence? And stopped reading. Seeing the shit she did/wrote like the week after I cooled off from MP100 feels like an atom bomb going off behind my head like she HUH?>????

I don't actually think "neutral on proship discourse" should be a warning sign, it's well-known that discourse is meaningless namecalling. It can be necessary to state your allegiances in specifically MP100 fandom because it attracts like a SHOCKING amount of people really weird about 13-year-olds, though. Disproportionate to any other fandom I've ever been. Something in the goddamn water in that fandom stg its EVIL out there.

Anyway I think an obsessive fixation on pedophilia was the actual warning sign. The fic is constantly full of these whiplash interjects like a fixative "wow, sure hope no one thinks I'm a creep, kind of creepy lol" circling. This kind of uncharacteristic fixation is what She Doth Protest Too Much really looks like.

I don't have much in the way in personal stories because I just gave them space. Uhhh I ended up in a discord server where she was friends with just about every frequent poster and popular artist in there. I found her behaviour to be kind of argumentative, but never escalating. So I was like okay, I was being uncharitable, it's just that she's sensitive. Just because I don't like her doesn't mean I gotta be rude. She unblocked me (I was blocked for saying proship electric chair as a joke) and I so I tried to be supportive and sociable by getting into her fic for a while. And now people are posting the most singularly insane quotes I've ever seen from right after where I dropped off. Holy mary mother of god.

And ok. Not to be presumptuous. but her friend SpCh is a notorious flying monkey to the point when I made a thread about how people in the west don't really bother researching other cultures and basic aspects of other countries, assuming they know everything, and SpCh misinterpreted the entire thread so badly I can only assume she was defending SC's honour based on 1 tweet. GIRL I WAS TALKING ABOUT SCUM VILLAIN FANFIC. IF A HIT DOG HOLLERS?

[thepoisonroom]

for anyone wondering what i meant by the "scav bothers me" copypasta

scav is this and this

scav bothers me was posted on facebook when i was an undergrad by my then-girlfriend's TA and was this:

"SCAV bothers me. I'm fine with nerds having fun in an overindulgent nerdfest. What really bothers me is the amount of importance this university puts on such a meaningless endeavor. People pretend like this is some celebration of creativity and intellectual originality. No. Wake up. You are not doing anything more significant than those weird geeks with Japanese fetishes who show up at anime conventions in droves having paid hundreds of dollars to create the most accurate Chun Li costume.

When you are at a rich private school that gentrified an entire community of low-income African Americans and eradicated an entire culture of jazz and arts under the name of urban renewal, when that school is currently celebrating a swanky new art center that purports to engage a variety of cultures while cutting its trauma program so that all the gunshot victims in the South Side die on the ambulance ride to Northwestern, you have an obligation to do something meaningful and relevant. UChicago not only is an Ivory Tower and a sheltered and privileged bubble; it celebrates being one. There is a reason this school has so many Nobel laureates and yet very little social relevance.

You want to do something creative? While I was at Harvard I saw student-produced theater that had incredible depth, social relevance and insight, and thoughtful creativity. Your student performances at Logan fall far short of that standard. Start there. Instead of bashing Harvard students for not being intellectual enough, why don't you realize that you need some proper training from real performing artists, people who understand humanity with more breadth and nuance?

You want to do something intellectual? Why not start some conversations about our real world, instead of indulging yourselves in weird abstract geekery that has zero social impact? You bash Harvard for having grade inflation, and you think your Core is oh-so-profound because everyone has to read works by Durkheim, but the average quality of talks, panels, and classroom discussions I've seen here is far lower than that at Harvard, intellectually as well as in social relevance. The real world doesn't exist in an abstraction. The real world is complicated and doesn't quite fit neatly into intellectual arguments, broad or specific. Producing t-shirts that ask "That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?" is not helpful.

So I guess the real reason SCAV bothers me so much is that it's emblematic of the whole self-indulgent, self-congratulating University of Chicago culture that is completely unaware of its privilege and so detached from reality. You have been given such blessings and resources that many students around the world can only dream of having. There are so many talented teenagers I have met working with under-resourced school districts that would probably look at your scavenger hunt and see the same thing we see when we look at Wall St -- an immense waste of talent and money.

When I host Harvard information sessions, I often talk about the kind of holistic growth that is possible only because you are surrounded by talented individuals and Harvard will give them the resources to do cool stuff -- student research, projects at international NGOs, student activism, student performing arts, student debates, etc etc. A few months ago, an elderly tired-looking woman raised her hand and asked me why I was talking about students having fun and wasting time instead of focusing on academics. I told her that the level of academics at Harvard is top-notch, but academics is just a given -- it's a baseline on which we build more multifaceted, impactful things. I told her it's not a waste of time, because think about it: if we want to solve the massive incarceration problem in the U.S., do you want your policies designed by a social scientist who assiduously studied the problem on paper, or do you want someone who did study the theory but also went to volunteer at a prison rehabilitation program? I cannot say the same thing about the University of Chicago; we do in fact waste ridiculous amounts of time and resources doing crap like SCAV and meaningless academic discussions that don't involve real applicable solutions to real world problems. I told the lady that if you want to solely focus on academics, you should go to the University of Chicago.

People criticize Harvard for graduating so many bankers, traders, and consultants. But I've seen a surprising number of people use those starting jobs as opportunities to learn more about the private sector so that they can create their own companies or do more impactful stuff in the public or non-profit sectors, and statistics from surveys on Harvard alumni back me up. There is a reason Harvard graduates so many CEOs, leaders, and politicians; and it is not just because of pedigree and exclusive elite circles.

I am not saying Harvard graduates are altruistic world-changers. They are self-aggrandizing people who seek personal glory and bullshit about visions while comfortably residing in their privileged sheltered worlds. But at least they have those visions. At least they want to make some sort of impact, and at least they pretend to care about our larger society while pursuing their own successes. When have nerds ever changed our society (outside of the natural sciences) by purely focusing on abstract academic problems? For all the transformative theories that the social scientists at UChicago have come up with, why does this school have far less policy impact than Harvard does? How many new disruptive innovative companies or social projects do we ever see coming out of UChicago? This place has talent and resources. Why are we wasting them on SCAV when we can use that time to do much more meaningful things? Why are we ignoring our social responsibility?"

[hannahstarshade]

Been looking for Twitter alternatives, and other social media sites in general. I'm on the waitlist for Bluesky. No idea when I'll see that, and I haven't heard much about it either. I signed up for CuriousCat for funsies, but I don't think it's what I was looking for. I likely won't use it much. Now on to the juicy stuff.

Last night I signed up for Threads and I already don't like it. Right now, there are zero ways to control your dashboard. Or much of anything, really. Just the basic functions of Instagram, but with words. I'll see one or two posts from people I follow before an endless stream of thoughts from people I don't know or care about. Seeing the 4,508,877th member badge on my Insta page, as it relates to Threads, just hammers home how we're all just pieces of data to get swallowed up by the conglomerate. Not even bothering to hide the fact that it's all a numbers game. The app itself is clunky, lacking soul and personality. It's so boring to look at. A lifeless machine, and all 30+ million users and growing are the franticly spinning cogs.

I've signed up for Pilowfort a little while ago and I like it so far. Its closer to Tumblr. Given that Tumblr is always on the brink of disappearing, it wouldn't hurt to have a back-up. There are posts for everyone to see that live on your blog, but there are also individual communities that act as forums. Posts can have individual comment sections, which I guess helps keep things on-topic. I'm going to slowly transition to cross-posting both old and new posts there. It seems promising, and the interactions I've had with other users thus far have been pleasant. I've already seen a few guides and helpful tips for the internet refugees.

Then there's Spoutible. It was touted as black-owned, having no algorithm, and having mods that handled hate speech and bigots swiftly and appropriately. Those are some green flags. They also have a cute little whale mascot, so all that combined had me. It is the closest to a Twitter clone I've come across so far. The interface is easy to understand and navigate. Posts are limited to 300 characters, and can include pictures, gifs, videos, and polls. There are a lot of safety measures for you to customize your experience to avoid malicious accounts. One being a rating system ranging from Normal to Problematic to help distinguish normies from bots. To post something is to "Spout Off." The trending topics page is titled "Making Waves." I like the vibes, and I believe this app has a lot of promise.

The truth is I've been kind of ambivalent to Twitter, even years before the Elon fiasco. When I first joined, it was for following my middle school and high school friends. After I graduated, those relationships fell off one by one. My dashboard morphed into a cascade of influencer updates and artist promotions. All I could offer was superficial consumption and meaningless life updates. Posting became a competition of who could be the funniest or who had the hottest take, and your whole psyche takes a hit when you just can't hack it. Maybe a restart was inevitable, and necessary for all of our sakes. I'll be taking Twitter off of my Linktree and other socials for the time being, and I don't see the point in linking any of these new socials until I've had enough time to play with them and figure things out.

TLDR: I'm not a tech genius. I simply operate on vibes. Bluesky is mysterious, more data needed. Threads is bloated and leans heavily on the algorithm. Pillowfort is a nice comfy space, just need to get used to it. Spoutible has potential and immaculate vibes.

[anti-dazai-blog]

how do you deal with hate? like from what I understand, you posted your first "controversial" post knowing that people might hate you for it, and you did so anyways. even tho it might have felt like you were the only one who believed those things at the time. where do you get the confidence? cause honestly that was such a slay.

Like, obvi we all have our own opinions and I don't agree with everything you said but the confidence you had.. grrrr i like it so much 💗💗 i love it when people are real with their opinions.

okay ty, im sorry for rambling, gonna stop here now 😭😭

I really want to play it cool and say something like “I just don’t care what people think of me,” but honestly? Yeah I was terrified of posting my first BSD-related post.

I had been enjoying the BSD fandom from afar for about a year before posting anything about it. I’ve always had this personal pet peeve when (fictional or real) bullies get a free pass to be assholes when they’re conventionally attractive, but that applies to all fandoms, not just BSD and not just Dazai. 

(Note that that’s not a moral stance, there’s nothing wrong with liking a morally grey character, and there’s nothing wrong with finding a bad (fictional or real) person to be physically attractive. This pet peeve of mine stems more from how (fictional) bullies who aren’t attractive are seen as the biggest evil unleashed upon the world, while fictional bullies who are attractive are seen as The Ideal Boyfriend)

One day I saw a post pointing out one of the things Dazai did that bothered me, and I really wanted to add to it via reblog, but I was concerned I’d derail the original post, so I screenshot it and wrote a whole follow-up rant. 

Then I saved that post in my drafts for three days.

I posted something vague like “I really want to talk about this one character from this one fandom, but the fandom is very aggressive and they’d burn me at the stake if I said anything too controversial”

I don’t think I intended to explicitly tag it with anything searchable, but I must have said something like “#yeah this is about bsd those guys are scary”— apparently that counts as tagging it #bsd by tumblr’s standards, and someone from the bsd fandom (who I’m now mutuals with) responded with something like “most of us are nice! We wanna hear what you have to say!!” 

That was enough motivation for me to get that post out of drafts, and even then I didn’t post it immediately. I scheduled it to post for a time when I wasn’t home, so that if there’d be backlash I wouldn’t have to witness it live and I could just delete the post later.

Not only was there no backlash, but hardly anyone saw the post. Iirc it got between 3-5 notes. That was what gave me the confidence to continue talking about my (admittedly controversial) fandom opinions. 

My main blog is primarily a Shakespeare/Classic Lit blog, and the online fandom for those things encourages controversial opinions (as opposed to the standard anime blog, where it seems like posting controversy is a taboo). So once I had the confidence to interact with an anime fandom in the first place, it wasn’t too hard to post my controversial opinions, because that’s the internet culture I’m more used to.

As for how I deal with the hate, you’ll be glad to know there’s only one person on this entire site who sends (bsd-related) hate. If you’ve received any hate, it’s from her. So while I have received hate messages (everything ranging from “your blog sucks” to graphic suicide bate and murder threats), knowing it’s all from the same person makes it all pretty meaningless. Everyone else on tumblr just blocks what they don’t want to see, either by blocking blogs they’d like to avoid or by blocking tags for subjects that annoy them. 

Since I tag anything that speaks of Dazai in a negative way as “#anti Dazai,” I don’t often run into people who don’t want to see negative character analysis who’ve discovered my posts accidentally.

If you want to post about something, go right ahead! The people who enjoy the content you make will follow you, and the people who don’t will block you, and everyone will curate their own tumblr experience to make this site something we can all enjoy. Admittedly if the fandom you’d like to post to is bsd, you WILL get harassed by that one person, but everyone else in this fandom has gotten harassed by her too. We mostly just ignore her at this point. 

Posting controversial opinions to fandom spaces can be scary, but if you have something you’d like to post, go for it! I personally would recommend starting a side blog for it, that way if things really do get out of hand you could delete it easily without losing your tumblr account. But the most likely outcome is that it wouldn’t gain enough traction for anyone to be overly bothered by it. Controversial things are more often ignored than hated on.

(For context, I’m referring to this blog too! I’m a tiny little blog. So please don’t interpret that as some veiled insult, I’m in this group of “tiny controversial fandom blog” too)

Anyway. Best of luck to you!! And remember, the point of posting things is to have fun! If it’s causing more stress than enjoyment, there’s no shame in taking a break or logging off for a bit. I’ve taken multiple breaks, and I only post to the Anti-Dazai Series when I enjoy what I’m posting. 

[Also. I absolutely love controversial fandom opinions, especially if they’re well written. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not I agree, so long as it’s a cool or original take on the source material. So if you wanna dm me, I’ll definitely follow you and your blog full of all your hottest takes]

[laineystein]

I'm just curious since your posts are so well-written (if you don't have the time or energy to reply, or it's too personal, no problem!) I was wondering generally if you've ever dealt with not being able to apologize or not receiving an apology. These two thoughts are weighing heavily on me this month.

Aww achoti! Just need to share that I don’t speak much English anymore and really the only time I do in length is on tumblr and with y’all so I appreciate the compliment because some days I feel like I can’t string a sentence together 🫶🏼

And YES. I think what bothers me the most with teshuvah is that it’s such a complicated concept! Very rarely are we apologizing for stepping on someone’s toe or cutting them in line at the store. Usually our apologies touch on deep offenses — at least mine always do/did. I think as humans we also fail to realize when we offend people; something meaningless to us can often be so offensive to someone else, oftentimes without us knowing. So there’s the persistent struggle of letting someone know when they’ve hurt you and also the struggle on the flipside of apologizing for something you didn’t even realize you did. Am I making any sense? The entire point of my post was to show that no matter what texts and teachings tell us, asking for forgiveness and receiving it is one of the hardest things we do in life. So it’s okay if in addition to planning your yomim tovim meals you’re also stressed with the emotional side of RH.

For context, I currently am the person that someone is struggling to forgive. It’s my best friend. She thought she forgave me but it’s clear she still has a lot of feelings about it and sometimes emotions and pain take awhile to settle before we can truly feel them. So I’m giving her grace and I’m giving anyone whose in the same predicament that same grace.

🤍🤍🤍🤍

[thesunisrising]

hard period

fem!reader x non idol!jake

TW: +18, mention of self-harm, the reader is mentally unstable; lmk if I forgot something.

w.c: 447

Inspired by: Die for you - The Weeknd and Golden hour - Jvke

(the songs are not related to this at all, but I listened to them while I was writing)

By reading this, you confirm that you are of legal age and take responsibility for reading it yourself.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。..・。.・゜✭・.・

The bulb flickers, the light dims, illuminating the room in a dirty gray. The cold tiled floor is covered with transparent drops. A girl has been lying near the bathroom for more than half an hour. Holding tightly to her hair, she tears it out, trying to find solace in the pain. Prior to that, she broke the mirror over the sink after a dialogue with her reflection about how worthless, incapable, stupid, insignificant she is. Even earlier, she destroyed half of the apartment: chairs, candlesticks, dishes, everything that first came to hand. The only thing that could help her, or rather who is her boyfriend, but he is simply not aware of what is happening. Alone, unhappy, she shudders in silent sobs, with thoughts that her life is meaningless, that it would be nice to end it right now, but she has no strength and is scared. The realization of death is terrible, it’s scary what Jake will think when he sees the disfigured body, the reaction of the family is terrible - they won’t survive what happened, and the mother will completely go crazy.

“Maybe no one needs me?” It flashes through the girl's head, and she, taking a piece of the mirror, climbs into the bathroom, turning on the cool water. Clothes get wet unpleasantly and she takes them off, throwing them somewhere to the door. Gently, without pressure, she runs the shard along her thigh, still pondering her decision, then runs it over her stomach and shoulder. Tears again accumulate in the eyes and the small one rolls down the cheek. The front door slams inaudibly, after a couple of minutes a quiet knock on the bathroom, but the sound of water and concentration blocked everything. The light from the corridor enters the room and the guy first stops on the threshold in a stupor, and then flies up to the girl. He does not know what to do. First, he tries to bring her out of a trance, then pick up a sharp fragment, the second is successful. He touches the water - it is icy, so he first lowers it, and then takes out the girl, wrapping her in a towel. Everything happens without words. He tries to draw her attention to himself, holds his beloved by the cheeks, which with a defocused look looks somewhere at the wall. He finally takes her to the bedroom, laying her on the bed, dresses her, and lays down next to her, drawing her to him, warming her.

"Honey, why are you doing this to yourself? Why did you want to leave me, your family?" - whispers in the top of her head. Hands as tightly as possible clasp the exhausted body.

"I'm sorry. I just can't do it anymore. It's hard for me." - is heard in the chest area and he moves away a little.

"Baby, why didn't you tell me? After all, we talked about this - to share if something oppresses us." He meets her red eyes and can't help but let out a sob. "Please don't do this to us. Speak up if something is bothering you and maybe together we will come to a solution to the problem. Just don't leave us, everything is solved." - in response, she nods and again cuddles in his arms, inhaling the soothing perfume. She is surrounded by the warmth and care of a loved one, and his head is filled with thoughts of how to get her out of this state. Sleepless nights and busy mornings ahead. After all, if this is repeated again and again, it's time to resolve the issue in a more global way…

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。..・。.・゜✭・.・

Well, this is my first post here. I hope there are not so many mistakes in the text, because actually I am not a native speaker, although I have an advanced level of English, anyway you can help me by correcting me. And please tell me if it was good or bad and thank you for reading.

[princessnotfound]

Addressing the Drama

I'm not entirely sure why this needs to be addressed, as I presumed people were smart enough not to jump to conclusions so easily, but something needs to be said before this gets any more out of hand than it already is: this 'Uncovered' gossip account is bullshit and nothing but. All of their posts consists of meaningless accusations and shit-talking and no proof whatsoever.

First of all, all of these posts made towards random students to mock, belittle or irritate them are just completely unnecessary. As far as I'm aware, none of us have done anything wrong, certainly not anything that is deserving of all this chaos. It's actually embarrassing to see the amount of people feeding into this as if they wouldn't switch up as soon as a post is made about them. Not fun having strangers lie about you to the public, is it? Grow up. There are other ways, not involving harassment and spreading false information, to make you feel better about yourself.

And onto more recent news, Fundy and I are not an item. Be so fucking for real right now; friends can be affectionate with each other, it isn't something to be shamed for and it does not have to imply anything more than just friendship. Some people like affection more than others. So what? Mind your damn business. Tell me why more people have an issue with the idea of two people having a close relationship than the fact that some fucking creep took pictures of us in my back garden? What should be being addressed is how vile it is to involve yourself in people's personal lives -- especially to this extent. Surely anyone can imagine how uneasy it feels to know that someone was that close to my garden, taking pictures. This started as just frustrating gossip, now it's not only a violation of mine and Fundy's privacy, but our safety as well. Whoever took that photo, stay the fuck away from my home.

Lastly, these accusations about me apparently selling myself for my grades are disgusting. I already have a stable occupation and a steady income, I go to this university for my own enjoyment and education. I have no reason to do something like that just to get my grades up; not every pretty face has no fucking brains. I'm sorry it's difficult for some of you to get your grades up but that isn't the case with me. I put the effort in, and I couldn't care less whether or not people choose to acknowledge that, but suggesting that I sleep with people for better marks? Stop. It's gross and it's just false. It isn't any of your business - none of my sex life is - so instead of speculating on the life of a living, feeling human being, focus on yourself.

Gossip doesn't bother me. But when it starts getting this far, it does. Eventually, this drama account is going to be taken down and have one too many lawsuits on their ass; don't become part of it unless you want to end up in court too.

[gillianthecat]

hi gillian! you have so much to say about all the bls you watch (this is definitely not a bad thing, i enjoy reading what other people think about our shared interests) but i was just wondering how did you survive being a lurker? did you write your thoughts anywhere or did you just kept them to yourself? i struggle with this myself, i feel like i have so much to say about everything, but i don't really say it or share it, i happily read other people's opinions and silently agree or disagree idek where i'm going with this lmao i guess i'm just curious to know such a "talkative" and person as you was once a lurker

Hi Anon!

So interestingly, when I was a lurker I didn't watch BL at all, barely knew what it was. I joined Tumblr because of a hockey romance writer (Taylor Fitzpatrick, I'm still a big fan of her work) and then mostly started following fanfic writers. Because I mostly read fanfic for media I don't read/watch or for sports RPF in sports I don't follow (which I know makes me a bit of an outlier) I didn't have much to say about the source materials. And because my tendency when writing about stuff is to be pretty analytical and to pick works apart even when I love them, that wasn't something I was going to do in public on tumblr where any of the authors (many of whom I followed) could see it. That just felt invasive. All of which is to say, being a lurker came very naturally to me at the time; it honestly didn't really occur to me to do anything else. And I didn't write my thoughts down or share them with anyone else, my fanfic reading (indeed most of my reading) had always felt like a private part of myself. I had plenty of thoughts and comparative analyses, etc, but it just kind of bubbled up in my brain and then disappeared.

My transition into posting on here about BL happened fairly spontaneously, pretty much immediately after I started watching BL; I don't really remember consciously deciding to make that change. Perhaps I did, and it's fallen out of my mind, I do remember being a little anxious the first time I reblogged something with comments of my own, feeling worried that I would bother people or people would think I was weird or something. On the other hand, my reblog was about Pete and Vegas' kink-filled explicit sex scene, so I must not have been that nervous 😂 I do remember tagging a lot of my posts "#my ramblings" early on; that self depreciation helped me mitigate my self-consciousness about whether my words were "worthwhile." Which I've come to the surety (at least on most days) is a meaningless concept here on tumblr, people can follow you or block you, you're not forcing your words in anyone's face. Seeing all the silly stuff that does get posted has helped me get over the feeling that I'm supposed to be making "worthwhile" content.

It's very freeing (especially as a former perfectionist who once felt she had to read and analyze every single one of an author's dozen or so novels* in order to write a term paper on him) to realize that I don't have to be an expert on anything to write about it on here. I can write in the voice that I want to, and use too many adjectives and adverbs and run-on sentences, and not feel like I have to write concisely or "properly" or even "understandably" if I don't feel like it. I can just share my thoughts and reactions and even be wrong (gasp!) or ignorant (the horrors!) and nothing bad will happen. I've been fortunate in that no one has been hateful or even slightly rude to me yet (the QL community seems particularly kind, even for tumblr), but if it ever does happen, that block button is a powerful tool.

One interesting side effect (or perhaps cause, who knows how these chains of causality are linked) is that I almost never watch episodes of shows straight through anymore. I used to be a binge watcher, a whole season (or more!) in one go with barely a break. Now I almost always pause many many times an episode. Sometimes just to take a break, sometimes to write down my thoughts in the notes app or something (i'll often have two devices in front of me at once, or switch back and forth between apps/tabs/programs) or to liveblog here on tumblr. I'm now pretty much incapable of watching a show without feeling the urge to write about it. Which is both good and bad 🤷🏻‍♀️

In terms of what actually happened to get me posting: I think sometimes (like today) my brain just overflows and then I start writing and the self-consciousness mostly falls to the wayside. Which isn't a helpful suggestion if that's not what your brain does, but it is what happened.

The Advice Part:

I have a couple of ideas for you, based on possible things that could be holding you back from participating. If it's that you feel self-conscious, you can keep doing what you're doing now and sending anonymous thoughts to other bloggers. Not everyone accepts anon asks, but most people who do are happy to publish them and have a conversation with people on anon. Or you could create a sideblog, or even an entire separate blog that you use to post your thoughts about BL, in a way that might feel even more safely anonymous than your regular tumblr. You don't even have to tag anything or follow anyone if you want the cocoon of being relatively invisible while expressing your thoughts. Then, if that starts to feel more comfortable you could start tagging, or reblogging other people's stuff, and start sharing your ideas more publicly. Or stay in that cocoon forever; there is no reason to leave if that's what feels comfortable!

Or you could start (assuming you don't already) by reblogging stuff and adding comments in the tags. And if that starts to feel less scary, or like not enough room for what you want to say, you could shift to reblogging with comments in the... whatever its called, the not tags. And replying rather than reblogging might feel a little safer - it's not quite so public, only the original poster or those who intentionally look into the notes will see it.

If the issue is that you feel overwhelmed by all your ideas, or all the shows, you could pick one or two shows to talk about. Or one or two bloggers to reply to. Or set a goal for yourself of one post a week/a day/whatever works. Just something to create some structure for yourself to make it feel less overwhelming.

Looking back over your ask, I'm not even sure you were looking for advice, but... uh... here some is anyways? Feel free to write back! With questions about this, anything else, or just to chat some more. Or for an anonymous venue for your thoughts!

(One last piece of practical advice, inspired by my computer just dying on me as I was finishing this up. Save Your Drafts! Save early and often. Save whenever you have to navigate away from the editing page. Most of the time the post editor is pretty good. And it even has an autosave function now, at least sometimes, under certain conditions. Which has saved me before from losing stuff, but it's not a surefire thing. So, since it's a pain to try and recreate something painstakingly written, I do highly recommend saving early and often.)

*the novelist was Ayi Kwei Armah, for anyone curious. and it must have been less than a dozen books. but it felt like a lot. sadly I remember very little of either the books or the term paper now.

p.s. I am like so unbelievably flattered by you coming to me for advice and wanting to know my story. i'm flattered by any and all asks i've ever gotten, really. so thank you 😊

[thothxv]

Computers in Media

Hi! I'm a CS student. I'm going to talk about some things with computers in them. What I think they got wrong, and what I think they got right. This will be shamelessly biased. And we'll be talking about accuracy, but as we'll see, accuracy is not always my priority. I just felt like rambling for a bit.

CSI

Well, you knew it was going to be here, the infamous scene from CSI:NY. And it gets so much wrong in just 15 seconds, and in a single sentence:

"I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic, see if I can track an IP address."

This is a bad sentence for multiple reasons. If you are a domain expert, you recognize that this sentence, inasmuch as it means anything, is just an absurd thing to say in 2008. If you're on the middle of a murder investigation, you don't make GUIs for something there are already many standard tools for. In addition, tracking an IP address through technical means in the context described (I read a plot summary for this) would be basically impossible. Getting the IP address would involve pulling log files and then getting the ISP to map that to a customer and location if they can. All of that is a legal process, not a technical one.

But this is also bad for a much worse reason: it's meaningless to a non-technical audience. Most of the people who look at whatever you make aren't pedantic little shits like me. They're people who don't understand the domain. They might have heard the term "IP address" before, but the rest of this is just fancy gobbledygook designed to wow them.

If you don't know what you're talking about, say nothing. "I'll try to track where the posts are coming from" would have been a better phrase to use here. No technical details, but if you know how that would be done, you can fill in the blanks. If you want some more technicals, "I'll try to get the IP address the posts are coming from so we can figure out where they are" is fine. If the audience already knows how IP addresses might be used you can obviously leave off that last part. This all works when computers are on the periphery of your story, of course. If they're central, you might need more detail.

Sneakers

Sneakers is a thriller movie from 1992 with comedy elements. It's about a quirky team of penetration testers (for those who don't know, penetration testers are groups companies pay to try and break their own security) who get hired by the government to go steal a mysterious box from a mathematician. It's a fun movie.

Except for a level of technical accuracy that is just plain weird. Sneakers takes liberties, plenty of them, usually for the purpose of giving the audience more of a show, but everything about its fundamental premise, everything about its macguffin, is just... correct?

The below scene is spoilers for Sneakers:

I love this scene, and I especially love the music, which is just great. As for the technical aspects, I have no idea what a "quadrant" is supposed to be, and the way the team would make the discovery would, in real life, be a lot more boring. But that quick, two-sentence explanation of how all this is happening, that is correct, and I don't think I could have said it better. And as the movie goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that they probably have a specific unsolved mathematical problem in mind that this box solves. At least, I have my suspicions. I don't think it's a coincidence that Leonard Adleman was asked to consult on the film.

But, they don't bother to explain any of that. They clearly did research, despite taking a lot of liberties and implying lie detectors work. But they don't talk about it onscreen, because to the audience, the technical background doesn't matter that much. It's the inverse of that CSI scene.

Funnily enough, the tale of Sneakers' production begins with another movie about hackers. One less interested in reality, but much, much more influential in shaping it.

WarGames

I don't care to rank things, so I won't. But WarGames is the most important movie on this list. Arguably, it's one of the most important movies about computers ever. For better or worse, WarGames shaped public policy, gave the public indelible images of what a hacker looked like and what they could do, and left a permanent imprint on hacker culture. DEFCON (the convention, not the US Armed Forces Defense Readiness Condition) is called DEFCON because of this movie. Wardialing is called wardialing because Matthew Broderick used that technique in this film. This movie had a direct impact on US security policy and on the development US laws around computer hacking. Kevin Mitnick was held in solitary confinement for a year because a prosecutor told a judge that if he got near a phone he could dial up NORAD and launch a nuclear missile, and the court bought it.

WarGames is a story about an AI that has been put in charge of nuclear missile launch control and could be dialed up over the phone. The AI could almost certainly not exist in 1983, and even with the lax security of the era it is extremely unlikely it would be connected to the public telephone network. WarGames doesn't care, because it's much more interested in its narrative and message than being accurate. And rightly so: it's a great movie as a result. But those choices had consequences that the writers probably couldn't have foreseen. it raised awareness and fears about computer security that were honestly kind of justified, but it also lead to the kind of mania and warped public perception of hackers that could lock someone in solitary confinement for nonsense reasons and result in overly harsh laws around computer crime.

But for all WarGames gets technically wrong, it also gets a lot of things right. Once again, the writing time consulted with all the right people, hackers and other computer experts. Approaches like wardialing were real, as were important computer systems exposed over the phone to anyone who bothered to dial in. The techniques used to crack passwords were and are very real, and can be quite effective.

And then there's the message. The idea that human judgement must be in the loop on major decisions, that trusting a machine alone is not acceptable, especially in the context of the madness of nuclear brinkmanship, where the wrong choice could literally end the world (although WarGames also takes a pretty explicitly negative stance on nuclear brinkmanship as a whole...). Sensors can fail, inputs can be wrong, someone has to actually look at the outputs and say "...really?" And this is exemplified by a scene in WarGames, right near the end, where Professor Falken has to convince the military to call off launching the missiles. He argues that what's on the monitors makes no sense, that the only logical reason for it all is a systems malfunction.

I bring this up because WarGames released on June 3, 1983. Three months later, on September 29, 1983, the world was saved by Stanislav Petrov arriving at the same realization when Soviet nuclear early-warning satellites detected incoming missiles that weren't there. If that's not chilling, I don't know what is.

For all its tangled legacy in popular culture, at least this new fear of random kids dialing into computer systems will mean they'll be made more secure.

...it will mean they'll be made more secure, right?

Why are you looking at me like that?

The Cuckoo's Egg

I keep bringing up this book, because it's great. The Cuckoo's Egg is different from everything else I've discussed, because The Cuckoo's Egg, despite reading like a bit like a zany cold war spy thriller, is non-fiction. This really happened. In 1986, an astronomer-turned-sysadmin at UC Berkeley really did discover and track down a computer hacker trying to break into US military computers to find information to sell to the soviets.

This does mean I don't need to talk about whether or not this book is accurate. It is. What stands out about The Cuckoo's Egg, in its depiction of computers, is its ability to be read by a lay audience. Unlike every other good example I've covered, which are movies that took a basically correct technical idea and ran with it while working hard to get the big stuff right and create a veneer of reality, The Cuckoo's Egg has to get into the nitty-gritty of some relatively technical subjects. The emacs movemail exploit, the differences between BSD and System V, password cracking, other technical subjects are key to the story and need to be explained. And it's very good at this. It explains enough to understand the story, but doesn't fall into the trap of overexplaining. It's very good at picking the right details to cover and the right ones to simplify or not discuss. And you can see the difference between it and the paper that the author wrote discussing the incident for a technical audience.

Jurassic Park

"It's a UNIX system! I know this."

In Jurassic Park we see a quintessential example of the Hollywood Computer UI. Everything is flashy 3D and UIs that make little to no sense in reality as something you'd actully use but look cool and scan easily on the big screen. Nobody in their right mind would use a faux-3D file explorer like this one. It's full of slow, clunky transitions, and that awkward slowness is fantastic for cinematic tension but miserable in real life. With a famously special-effects heavy movie like Jurassic Park, you can imagine that time and budget that went into making this fancy 3D visualization.

That's right, zero time and budget. I think this is more common knowledge now, but that 3D file explorer is a real program. It's called fsn, and it would have come packed in with the SGI graphics workstations that were being used to animate them dinosaurs, as a way of showing off the machines' 3D graphics capabilities. Of course, it's a total toy, just a demo really, and nobody would use it on a daily basis. It's real... but unrealistic.

Mind, I don't care. Film is a visual medium, and it's not a crime to use some visuals or visual metaphors that normally don't appear on real computers. Like I said, accuracy is not my primary concern... so long as it's not jarring or immersion breaking. And while it would never happen as depicted, hunting through the filesystem to try and guess the command to do something is something I've definitely done.

Mr. Robot

Didn't watch it much, but I feel like it would get brought up if I didn't mention it. Mr. Robot was well known for getting technical details correct. From what I've seen, it does in fact do this.

The same is true of all of the following:

Silicon Valley

The technical consultants don't want to be yelled at on Reddit. Apparently some people who work in Silicon Valley have had to take breaks from the show because it got too real for them.

Halt and Catch Fire

I remember a story I heard on a podcast about a programmer who wanted to watch this show with his son, and his son asked if there was normally this much sex in computers (the answer was no), and apparently just seemed bored by all the sex and asked if they could watch something else.

This more or less summarizes my opinion of Halt and Catch Fire. It seems to be pretty accurate from what I saw of it, but I stopped watching because I got tired of all the boring, boring, boring sex and related drama.

Okay, back to things I want to talk about.

Castle

Speaking of notorious hacking sequences:

...What could I possibly have to complain about? This is the best thing ever.

This is really a great example of those terrible nonsense UIs I was talking about. And that random pseudo-rubik's-cube visualization? Why? And don't get me started on "cyber nukes."

Like I said, visualizations are fine, but this is just silly. Even someone who knows nothing about computers would know this is silly. Maybe that's the point but it just... really pulls you right out of the scene. This would have worked way better if they were more vague about the specifics of the "hacking" and focused on the conversation and personal stuff.

In conclusion: Masterpiece. 10/10, no notes.

Tron

In 1982, the academy award for best visual effects went to... E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The Saturn Award went to E.T. as well, and only the BAFTA Award for Best Visual Special Effects even nominated Tron.

This is because the Academy believed that using computers for visual effects was cheating.

We've talked about real things, realistic things, and stories that don't care about being real but want to feel real. Tron is none of those things. Is it realistic? No! Of course not! It's nonsense! But who cares? Tron basically wants to be a digital Alice in Wonderland. It's just using computers to paint a cool world inspired by videogames. I wouldn't say there's much deeper meaning.

But it just looks cool.