#This is absolutely not an effortpost

[fallowhearth]

Over the past week I've been consuming probably dangerous amounts of Reddit relationships, advice, and aita posts. In my defence I've been very sick and needed the content equivalent of pablum to keep me entertained. I've approached it both as a drama hog and as voyeurism into 'normie' culture. Some of my best friends are straight (:P) but they're also people who are a bit outside of the typical norms of straight society. So my view into the lives of the average Joe and Jane Suburban is fairly limited.

One interesting thing I noticed is the consensus about cheating on reddit is completely alien to my own intuitions and also to my life as a queer person. They as a group have settled on a bunch of baseline assumptions that are strange.

They seem to be in agreement that cheating is about opportunity: This one usually rears it's head as lukewarm justification for socially acceptable levels for controlling behaviour. It seems they agree its reasonable to ask your partner to scrub evidence of previous partners from their life: this indicates respect apparently. So, no exes in the Facebook friend list. They also agree its dangerous for people in relationships to have close friends of their preferred gender, to go to parties, to travel without their partner, etc.

The main thing I don't really get about this is that people who want to cheat are very good at creating their own opportunities and seem to have no trouble doing this, without their partner knowing. The flipside, is that all these opportunity-creating activities seem very normal and like things people do all the time without inadvertently having extramarital sex with each other. It seems to be implicitly accepting the cheaters' narrative; that they slipped and fell genitals-first onto another person and it spiralled from there. Obviously in this logic, if you keep your partner indoors and away from tripping hazards and nearby randos, they won't cheat. I don't think it works like that.

The exes thing is also weird. My intuition is that exes are the people least appealing as affair partners. Those two people have already discovered all the things they hate about each other. They are exes. A ban on exes would also be socially untenable as a queer person.

The actual roots of this assumption seem pretty clear. It sounds like an exhausting way to live. Moving on.

Redditors have largely adopted the party line that cheating is about trust rather than sex per se. But then they really seem to fixate on the sex. It seems accepted as normal to be having intrusive thoughts about your cheating partner engaging in sex acts with other people, to feel disgusted at the idea of the parts of your partner you 'own' being viewed by someone else, etc. Lots of ideas about sex being uniquely shameful or sacred. Not too out there culturally but somewhat in opposition to redditors' self-image as rational, enlightened and progressive.

This one is weird to me on a personal level but is maybe normal on a social level. I mean, I've been cheated on, and the actual details didn't really bother me. It seemed very much the same category of experience as platonic trust breaking from friends, family, colleagues, etc. To me the sex did not signify. (I'd also argue that the drama and life-ruination potential of a queerly platonic female friendship breakdown is far in excess of anything that can be achieved by people who are actually fucking.) It also didn't really leave me with trust issues or specific hangups. (On the other hand, previous parenthetical aside.)

But reddit has normalised talking about cheating like it's inherently life ruining and traumatic. Like there's no recovery. It's a bit weird to see 22 year olds posting about how their girlfriend cheating ruined their life forever. Sorry man but that doesn't seem like a sentiment that should be reinforced by a thousand other 22 year olds on reddit. What do I know though.

Anyway that was my week on reddit. I'm still sick but really hoping I find another way to pass the time.

[artbyblastweave]

How do you think Worm (+ Ward) would change if Wildbow wrote it in the present day? Both in the sense of him having more writing experience and of him xeconstructing a different superhero landscape. (Also, him having even more planning/drafting time.)

Well, one answer is, "I don't think it would have been written-" Worm really got released in an incredible sweet spot where superhero stuff was ascendant in the mainstream but not yet culturally dominant, and written in reaction to a bunch of specific stylistic dysfunctions of early-2000s big-two comics that aren't necessarily gone but have certainly shifted their manifestations a bit. I don't think Worm would have taken off the way it did if he was trying to write it today, when we're like three layers deep into comic book movie ascendancy, backlash and re-ascendency.

But to engage in slightly better faith, my suspicion is that if written today the book would be, in every sense of the word, more online.

Movement-building by The Very Online is already of visible interest to Wildbow from, like, Twig onward (probably a consequence of the ways in which he, himself is Very Online). You see this to an extent in Ward as written, which in the Capricorn flashbacks in particular had interesting worldbuilding ideas about superheroic social media marketing that Worm didn't go into in the same way because it wasn't as big then. (This, incidentally, was one of several beats, in both the story and in the extraneous materials, where Wildbow backdated elements of the 2020s internet zeitgeist into a setting where the world ended in 2013, which is a very funny way to end up with an alternate history.) This would dovetail with the genre in the sense that whenever I stick my head back into what's going on with Big Two comics these days, I perceive the space to have gotten way, way more online in quite a few ways. Comics that feel written for people on twitter, by people on twitter, with an eye for incorporating whatever the hot-button activist issue is that week and the kind of panels and dialogue that blow up when cropped and reposted without context. Ecoterrorist Thor, inherently-thematically-confused ACAB street-levelers, Miles Morales trashing a landlord's car. You know what I'm gesturing at with this one if you follow Why-I-love-comics or any of the other excerpt aggregators.

This is more of a value-neutral judgement than I'm making it sound- When Al Ewing does this kind of thing, it's usually great, when Tom Taylor does it...I have less charitable thoughts on when Tom Taylor does it. But either way I often feel that there's a building tension between a need for these things to be socially conscious, progressive, left-leaning and so forth, and the inherent limits of how much a mass-market status-quo-bound serial publication can commit to being any of those things-the mealy-mouthedness of framing superheroes as change agents in a setting where nothing ever changes.

Given the extensive write-ups of activism-issue aligned capes in the Weaverdice docs, and given the direction his writing took with Pale and Claw in particular, I find it hard to imagine that Worm as written in 2025 wouldn't want to poke at those tensions. Very-online young-gun superheroes firebombing Walmarts and sticking their dicks in police actions, except there's no editorial reset button and that actually goes somewhere politically. Probably somewhere bad.

[sol-flo]

the hunger games prequel is an aesthetic nightmare. a costume case study

^ fancy title for a glorified rant. idc.

hey so i watched the ballad of songbirds & snakes (2023) yesterday. if you don't know anything about the movie, it's bad. also it's the 10th hunger games and lucy gray is the district 12 tribute. she's culturally not really 12, but member of a roma coded nomadic group, and a well regarded (in the district) singer. we first see her at the reaping, and this is what she wears (she wears the same outfit for like half the movie because the games weren't fancy reality tv yet so she doesn't get costume changes or anything) (also kinda bad pic bc i wanted something horizontal also i can't find much better ones)

the second i saw this outfit i knew i was in for a bad time.

(btw i think this print on print blue dress over blue shirt on the left is great wish they'd gone for something like this instead)

here's the whole outfit, sorry for the vertical space i'm gonna take up:

(you can't tell from the pic but there are fairly tall heels on those boots. i'd estimate 5cm. pretty and good for performing, but you'd sprain an ankle really fast on that rubble)

now. why do i hate this. first off i think it's ugly. i don't really like the whole top being white because i think it looks a little disjointed — the swiss dot parts of the skirt look more off white / cream / ivory than the top part, and there's no lavender at all up top, and i think that looks awkward. not only that, but the dress coordinates very poorly with the stays. i think the stays are mostly nice (but you can tell they're not very stiff by the way they crease at the waist. which is nitpicky of me but i think they'd look nicer...); the cream is nice, but none of the colors in the print go together with the dress — blues and greens come out of left field, and the shade of pink is strange with the sunset-y colors too. the dark blue binding is very stark and doesn't match anything else in the outfit. the boots i have no complaints other than the heel, but they don't match the stays either.

anyway that's not the point though. a character can wear ugly poorly coordinated outfits and that's not a cinema sin. plenty of reasons to do that in fact, whatever, i'd just complain and move on. but what i actually take issue with is that she does not, in fact, have a reason to wear this specific combination of garments and it drives me up the wall. what she wears is distinctively fashionable to our 2020s eyes and entirely different from what every other district person in the movie is wearing. she stands out not only within her district but among all the tributes too (because they dressed the other 23 kids as street urchins).

here's the thing: the movie is kinda half-heartedly going for a more or less midcentury retrofuturism thing. kinda fallout-y. we don't linger for long at district 12 (and we barely saw it as of this first lucy gray scene), but they wear a lot of shirt dresses and 40s silhouettes in general (not too dissimilar from what katniss and prim wear for the reaping at the first movie). lucy gray might not be culturally 12, being forced to settle in the district by the capitol, but it's been at least ten years so the resources she has are gonna be similar. and even though the dress is her mother's, we see nothing like it anywhere else — when presumably other people would also still have access to surviving pre-war stuff.

so my pressing concerns with this are that these clothes look like they were made in our very own 21st century. i mean, they were, but uhh that's a bad thing for post apocalyptic speculative fiction set in an unspecified future?? the print on the stays looks digital (not hand painted, block printed or even silk screened). the tulle is synthetic, and the vibrant dyes look synthetic too. swiss dot, at least, can be cotton, but the outfit looks capitol, doesn't it? the other people on 12 are all wearing natural fibers, basically all cotton it seems, and blue is a common natural dye (shoutout to woad).

later on, she wears a bright purple dress. i'm talking very saturated. goldenrod crochet bikini. peasant-y boho blouse with clear machine embroidery and trims. also do you know how expensive broderie anglaise is? this bootleg 2006 vanessa hudgens shops at free people while everyone else seems unfamiliar with the concept of laundry.

and they don't even style her hair.

[tyrannuspitch]

um tumblr why would you hide my post from the tags... that one was a solid 4 noter and everything

[maniculum]

A reply to the scorpion effortpost (link):

@lucdzenlaurent this is getting its own post because I looked into it and I'm pretty sure you are absolutely correct. (Is this conjecture on your part, or is this an area in which you are knowledgeable and can share additional information?)

Pliny the Elder, who lived in the Mediterranean and absolutely knew what a scorpion was, includes this in his description:

It is an ascertained fact, that those which have seven joints in the tail are the most deadly; the greater part, however, have but six.

(From the Bostock translation.)

The word Pliny uses is internodia, which can mean "joints" or "segments", but the root nodus means "knot".

In the 13th century, Thomas de Cantimpre gives us the following:

But it has in any case in its knotty tail a venomous sting, so that it punctures and poisons any who approach.

(Translation mine, sorry if it's bad, my Latin isn't great and I couldn't find an English edition of De Natura Rerum.)

The word Thomas uses is nodosa, which can mean "knotty" or "knobbly". So he's not necessarily wrong, but the paraphrase could easily mislead someone.

So I think it's highly likely that Pliny's internodia, Thomas's nodosa (and any other texts paraphrasing Pliny), led people to believe that the scorpion had knots in its tail, not joints or segments. Which would absolutely explain images like these whose tails vexed me:

And in fact may also explain a lot of the twisty, spiraling tails on other scorpions that I had just assumed were artistic convention.

[liskantope]

I think part of the reason I tend to get so argumentative nowadays about "what your side proposes kills people" -type political talking points is that it seems that this is being used more and more frequently as a rhetorical bludgeon, mainly (though not entirely) from the Left. There's a lot of shutting down of arguments based on "but HUMAN LIVES", and it's begun to feel to me like a disturbing trend. For instance, a good bit of the rhetoric in favor of shutting down schools in 2020-2021 seemed to center on "here, look at my computation that the expected value of children's lives lost if we don't shut down schools is greater than zero; anyone who disagrees with us doesn't VALUE HUMAN LIVES", with the effect that a lot of us (including to some extent me) were blinded for a long time to the absolutely devastating effect such extensive school shutdowns (in some geographic areas) had on children and their whole families, an effect that is still scarring them today. I'm not saying anything about whether or how far those school shutdown policies went wrong, just that they had very substantial harmful effects that don't vanish relative to the VALUE OF HUMAN LIVES.

Then there's the now-everyday claim that the anti-trans culture warriors "ARE KILLING US [TRANS PEOPLE]", which is true under a particular interpretation of "killing" and tragically true to an extent pretty well beyond some vanishingly rare extreme cases but is also transparently being used to drown out most other aspects of the debates around trans issues. Much more disturbing still is the accusation I now semi-regularly see casually flung that conservatives "actively want us [trans or LGBT+ people in general] dead" (I think I've occasionally seen left-wing variations on this that aren't even about LGBT+ people). A couple of months ago I called it "stomach-turning" ("it" being both the content of the accusation itself and the fact that so many people in our cultural discourse have seen fit to use it; this of course was semi-willfully misinterpreted by someone as my saying that trans people turn my stomach), and I reiterate now that it's still completely turning my stomach. This example is different from others in some fundamental ways, some of which make me more sympathetic with why people feel driven to use it (and it's not being used to drown out completely unrelated issues, for instance, like the guns thing is), and the general rhetorical weapon of "the other side wants to kill us" deserves its own effortpost which I intend to write later this summer.

So anyway, yeah, I'm also getting a kind of short fuse around insinuations of "what they show kids in school won't kill them, but guns could, so that's the only issue involving schoolchildren that anyone should care about" that I now see daily.

Of course, invocations of "my cause is the one whose stakes directly involve life or death so it outranks everything else" isn't exclusive to the Left at all. The Right has been doing it for decades with abortion to shut down both the abortion debate and whatever unrelated debate they didn't want to have ("millions of babies are being MURDERED each year, while liberals obsess over [women's bodies] [or] [just about any totally unrelated issue which appears frivolous next to MURDER]"). I also vaguely remember something that sounded like this in the post-9/11 years ("we're the ones looking out for Americans who might be KILLED in the next terrorist attack, that has to be the only priority right now"). And there was that bizarre "death panels" accusation around 2010-2011 when Obamacare was being debated which I guess might also count.

Only loosely related, but I'm reminded of a moment in the very first vice presidential debate, between Bob Dole and Walter Mondale in 1976, where Dole invoked a computation of the number of deaths in wars the US engaged in under Democratic versus Republican presidents, and apparently he got a lot of blowback from how underhanded this rhetorical move came across.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Re: Reddit automod discourse, it’s strange to see the question framed entirely in terms of gatekeeping vs n00b inclusivity since my experience of automods was instead of rampant goodharting and the overt strangling of free expression

My principal interaction with automods was from one of the, ah, cooperative creative writing subreddits, where ppl would post prompts to attract co-writers. Which feels, in theory, like the exact sort of thing a subreddit would be good for: it creates a sort of natural market for writing partners, with the prompts acting as listings for applicants among whose proposals the op can select

It fell to the bot mod to carry out at least two central tasks: weeding out repetitive shit-tier prompts and implementing reddits larger censorship policies. These are, tbc, both important: if the mods didn’t have an automated way to enforce account age requirements and mandatory posting gaps and word limits, the place would be immediately overrun with day-old randos posting “asl?”; without clamping down at all on censored content, the entire sub would make itself a sitting duck for the stasi in the site administration. (Whether there should be stasi in the first place is a separate question, but I think once they exist you have some obligation to yr members to placate them if you want your sub to continue existing at all.)

The trouble is that, ofc, this automated mechanism is going to let in a lot of crap regardless. And so the reaction was… more onerous automated restrictions. For effortposting, this took the form of heightened minimum word counts; for pearl clutching, it took the form of increasingly paranoid prohibitions on words that might indicate conceptual adjacency to Unmentionables. In both cases the result (from my side as a prompt writer, at least) was ever increasing tedium with no real (positive) effect on quality: finding ways to distend the prompt artificially, scrupulously avoiding whatever trigger words the bot had decided were off limits. It wasn’t hard to see this was a red Queens race on both fronts, which contributed to my easing off of the platform

The censorship side of it was exacerbated by the increasingly vague, moralistic, and draconian site wide rules the bot was tasked with enforcing, which both seem to have encouraged more hedging and anxiety as a defensive measure from the mods as well as emboldening their own repressive impulses, culminating in a particularly ludicrous ban on content involving certain geopolitical affairs the mods evidently found distasteful to feature on the sub, for which they appealed as justification to the nebulous and politically self-absorbed stated principles of site governance by then in place

And the kicker? The sub still fucking sucks at its job!! The listing/applicant structure plus the personality of the median redditor (not to mention the censors) means a clear incentive to produce a consistent run of samey, not-especially-daring prompts suited for generating accordingly dull material. No amount of autodeletions will prevent that. I had many more interesting sessions and longer projects from my time in college spent trawling Omegle, a “community” with barriers to entry buried in full deep within the earths crust. Yea, there were more absolute shit tier “f?”-level users there, but I ultimately don’t care that much about the distinction between absolute shit tier and mediocre shit tier given I’ll refuse both, and with Omegle you could just repeatedly disconnect from partners until you found someone to yr taste, however esoteric and unseemly and curt that might be, instead of having to simultaneously compete with other prompt writers in a struggle for the attention of the subs lowest common denominator

And there weren’t any fucking picrew-ass alien pfp’s either

[deermouth]

when people make posts about how annoying it is to see so many mawkish, surface-level "analysis" posts of the popular thing du jour i'm always like........... is this not the mawkish, surface-level analysis website. i too enjoy an actually compelling effortpost, but just, statistically speaking.

(i know i only feel this way when i like the thing du jour and am willing to give a lot of dumb shit a pass. when i don't like the thing, this person is absolutely correct and these posts should be set on fire, of course.)

[spiderfreedom]

gender around the world

thinking of making an effortpost elaborating on my 'gender is about power' post. a lot of people don't know just how common gender roles are across the world. like, every society that we know of has gender-segregated labor. they're not all equally strict, but this division is one of the few human universals we know of. and another one is that in every society we know of, women are responsible for childcare.

not all societies denigrate women. the extreme denigration of women is basically societies that imprison women at home, because to appear in public is to be 'indecent' and therefore mark you as a bad woman worthy of punishment and violence. these are called ideologies of female seclusion. examples include, to varying extent, ancient athens, modern iran, ancient china, the modern christian fundamentalist movement. these societies also tend to culturally devalue women's contributions to society. lip service will be given to the importance of mothers, but the most important and recognized people in society will be men. any influence women have tends to be behind the scenes influence on particular powerful men. this type of seclusion is somewhat more common in europe and asia.

some societies culturally recognize women's value and allow women to become high-status individuals publically. women appear in public, have spheres of power they control, and are not systematically degraded (but a caveat, which i explain soon). these societies include the ancient oyo benin of western africa (modern day descendants are the yoruba), the iroquois, the inuit, the !kung people. this type of cultural recognition is somewhat more common in africa and the (indigenous) americans.

now for the caveat - even societies that viewed women as valuable, important, powerful, often have anti-women organizing principles. arranged marriage exists among the inuit and !kung people, for instance, with an older man betrothed to a girl or young woman. there are multiple yoruba proverbs that denigrate or patronize women. these societies are not feminist utopias. they are societies that believe in the complementarian value of women's work, recognize it, and where women are expected to be full members of society. this does not mean that men and women are utterly equal in dignity.

there are many manifestations of the arrangements above - the lamalerans of indonesia don't have a culture of seclusion but do value men's labor over women's. even among fundamentalist christians, we see different levels of female seclusion and leadership among the different subgroups. i note trends, and trends are not absolute.

why does this matter to us? because it proves that gender is not a liberatory principle. gender is not even primarily an aesthetic principle. gender is a script handed to people that they must play so society can function. some scripts say that women's roles are important and valuable and ought to be celebrated. other scripts say that women's roles are less important and women are shameful and should stay secluded. but it is worth noting they are scripts nonetheless.

understanding that gender exists to organize labor, values, reproduction, also means you understand why feminists should study economics. male anxiety about female empowerment rises when male employment is threatened. in other words, rising unemployment for men = increasing anxiety about women "replacing" them = increasing desire for strict gender roles that "assure" men places in society. (btw - many women also feel the same in societies where they depend on men, and employed women are viewed as enemies.)

until we figure out how to get men to stop being existentially concerned with their place on the masculine hierarchy, decreases in male employment and male success will continue to be boons to anti-feminist. and so, in addition to being worried about unemployment because of how it affects women's labor directly, feminists should be worried about unemployment because it ferments anti-female resentment. (could managing unemployment levels thus turn out to be a way to control anti-feminist sentiment, so that feminists can lay groundwork for more advanced feminist points? instead of always worrying about maintaining the gains we have? food for thought)

[ark081]

Assorted A-for-EffortPost

Advent is my secondary tenno OC (pictured here). Their main frame is also Volt (Thales helmet, Graxx skin, Draugen Syandana, all-black with silver accents), parallel to Rem. Excalibur Umbra guides this forgotten void-child.

Wretched and more than half-feral, this territorial epopt prowls the plains of Duviri. The drifter known as Adversary didn't willingly associate himself with Advent, but has since grown tolerant of his reflection. His ire was hardly reserved for the young Tenno, however. Though Volt was his first, Harrow is his main and preference.

Dracul Thrax is the child-king of Duviri, based on young Advent's dreams of rising above their fate-ordained station and joining the gleaming ranks of Dax. This brat fancies themselves a grand commander of military force. No doubt their smug self-assuredness has sent Lodun into absolute fucking conniptions.

(AU) The four-headed Void Cherub may have at one point been Advent, but little recognizably remains within its twisted countenances.

[fallowhearth]

These books came out too long ago to have a substantial Tumblr fandom. So, since someone has to chronicle the ship-bait, it may as well be me! Part 3.

Stonny / Nektara

[max1461]

The thing that you have not quite isolated yet is why having a strongman would be better for people’s lives. Can you answer that? Yes. I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people’s lives. When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You’re looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. This is an example you use a lot, where you say, If Apple ran California, wouldn’t that be better? Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it. I’m sorry, I’m here in this building, and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust The New York Times more than any other source in the world, and how is The New York Times managed? It is a fifth-generation hereditary absolute monarchy.

From the NYT Curtis Yarvin interview. He's saying the same thing as me! He's saying the same thing as me, and as @aorish, it's just that our values are all different. Me and Curtis and aorish, we have different perspectives on what an ideal world looks like. But the facts of the matter are easy to see.

By the way, before I go on: the 40-hour work week is about 1/3 of your waking hours, not 2/3. If I'm going to make this into an effortpost, I have to correct a mistake that embarrassing at the outset. Conversely maybe the desire to correct me will act as ragebait that will help this post spread, so who's to say whether it's good or bad in the end.

Anyway, I elaborated a little bit on these ideas here (other relevant-ish posts here and here; it's crass to link your own shit to too great a degree but I'll do it anyway. Kontextmaschine style.). From my perspective, a core feature of a just world is that people have autonomy—the practical capacity to direct their own lives, according to their own ends, preferences, and beliefs. In some domains, one person's decisions don't significantly affect another's (an example: personal sexual behavior; if you're gay that doesn't mean anybody else needs to be gay, etc., it effects others only very marginally), and so autonomy becomes a matter of negative freedom, non-coercion. But in some domains, decisions by their nature have to be made collectively. People have to coordinate to get anything done. This is true in matters of government and it's true in matters of production; these are complex activities in which many individuals must coordinate towards a common goal, and in which even people who aren't explicitly involved and didn't consent to this coordinated activity are effected by the outcomes it produces. So, I think, in inherently coordinated tasks, autonomy has to manifest as some kind of democratic process.

It's impossible almost by definition to give every individual the power to fully direct their own activities in a coordinated process; if they do that then the process isn't coordinated anymore. But by democratizing the process we produce some kind of approximation. Giving every participant a voice in directing the coordinated aspects of the project according to some fair scheme (what defines a fair scheme? It's a hard question) distributes decision-making power so that, even if the participants cannot fully direct their own activities and strive for their own ends, they each get some amount of say in what their activities will be and to what ends they will be working.

Figuring out the best implementation of this is a really hard problem. It is probably not as simple as "mandate that every company now be run as a worker co-op", as I try to elaborate on in the linked posts. But the goal, as I see it, is a world in which individual autonomy is increased by adopting a laissez-faire stance on those issues where coordination problems are minimal (such as gay rights), and increasing democratizing in those arenas in which coordination is necessary (such as the state and the economy). And this might result in less stuff being produced, or worse stuff being produced, and it's an empirical matter where exactly all the various trade-offs here should be made. I don't think a one-size-fits-all approach makes sense (again, as I try to articulate in the various linked posts).

But, roughly, this is my political agenda, this is what my libertarian socialism means. Yarvin sees companies as mini-monarchies, and thinks this is good, because they function more efficiently that way, and thinks the state should mirror this style of organization. I see companies as mini-monarchies and think it's bad, because it decreases the autonomy of the people who have to spend a lot of their life as part of the processes directed by those companies—and I think both the state and the economy could be made more democratic than they are, and that would probably be good. Subject to various empirical issues mediating exactly where the trade-offs should be made. But I think the trade-offs should probably be made pretty far left of here, as it were.

Call me old fashioned but I believe that if you spend upwards of 2/3 of your waking hours at work and you don't have workplace democracy you aren't meaningfully free. Call me old fashioned but I believe America is genuinely not a free country and neither is any other liberal democracy, etc. etc., in a really very straightforward sense.

[rabbit-surfboard]

Lots more consumption since last effortpost. Being unemployed during the summer is a lot of fun, I've been riding my bike and doing so so much cooking and visiting home and still had time to watch many a show! I even got back into reading for the first time since high school.

The first physical book I've been reading in literal years is Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (what an absolutely sick name). I picked a lucky one, it's not often that a book causes a significant paradigm shift and rarer still that you get to appreciate it in the first quarter of the book. I've learned a lot about modern mycology from the famous contemporary mycologist Paul Stamets, and I appreciate his perspective of fungi as chemical factories, with particular inputs and outputs. It's useful, and Stamets shows off the power of this idea with his work in mycoremediation and other real world applications, but I find it reductive. Sheldrake emphasizes a more holistic approach throughout his aptly named book, and focuses most on how organisms engage with each other in an ecosystem.

I'm an electrical engineer by trade so all of the science I typically engage with is abstract physics stuff, not abstract biology stuff. While it would be silly to assume that Ms. Irwin's 7th grade biology class (the sum total of my education in that area) was comprehensive and entirely accurate, one of the incomplete facts I'd been holding onto for far too long was that a lichen is a symbiotic pairing between algae and fungus. In my favorite chapter so far from Entangled Life, Sheldrake summarizes many ideas from an academic paper with one of my favorite titles ever: Queer Theory for Lichens. It's worth a read but the book version is definitely easier, if less detailed. The point is the same though -- while you can introduce a single fungus and a single algae and get them to form a lichen in a lab, the lichens found in nature are so much more complicated. Typical species often have multiple fungal or algal symbionts, and even have bacterial components that help them work, kind of like us with our guts. It makes lichen extra hard to characterize and opens up the fun question of What is an organism? from a philosophical angle of asking whether an organism is an individual. Are you really you with a completely different set of gut flora?

[maniculum]

Hello, new people. So, a development has occurred:

Anyway, I am absolutely going to continue rating medieval scorpions as I find them and as they are sent to me (again, if you're sending me one, tell me the manuscript it's from so others can locate it). I enjoy it as much as y'all clearly do.

For new arrivals, hi, this is a podcast account that I technically share with my cohost (she isn't on Tumblr much), and I have made a pinned post (link here) explaining what that podcast is, in case any of y'all are interested in hearing two nerds read medieval stuff and make jokes about it. (We also talk about D&D.)

I might also do more effortposts now and then; it's nice to see others find humor in medieval nonsense the way I do.

In conclusion, I am bad at ending posts. Welcome, all.

[memecucker]

I’ve been trying to read more about ‘aia the term for pre-colonial atheists in Hawaii and I’m gonna make sure all the sources and stuff are straightened out before making a longer effortpost but the stuff I’ve seen that has gone more in depth than “there were atheists in precolonial Hawaii” says the ‘aia came from the marginalized underclass of low-caste people and they existed in bitter conflict with the priests and kings who boasted of having divine blood (particularly after the wars of Kamehameha, as war captives are at the absolute bottom of the caste system) and it’s like hmm

[togglesbloggle]

As a data point, I did read (and greatly enjoy!) your book as a direct result of this account being made, and plan to read the rest of them now as well. The number of new sales from Tumblr may have been zero; the number of new fans was not. I was fascinated by the ways it was and wasn't similar to the fiction I'm used to, and there's some kind of deeply compelling Principle of Genre going on there that I'll be chewing on for a good long while.

Having been on Tumblr for a while now, I'll say that you're a dramatic outlier in terms of words written per day, particularly as a measure of original essays rather than replies to existing content. If you went down to one of these effortposts per week, that would be closer to a reversion to the mean than anything, albeit in larger lump-sums rather than distributed in small batches.

I'm on the opposite side of the bell curve, with a real effortpost maybe every month or two. (One of the reasons I'm here is to practice writing as a craft, so I do try not to let it completely devolve in to mere reblagging, but the blog proper is a victim of my success- I get paid to write these days, so I have less need of a casual sketchbook in my downtime and less itch to write when I'm resting.) Like you, I got a small boost to follower count early on from certain people highlighting me, and since then I've grown at a steady clip. 3-4 years was kind of the inflection point for me, after which my follower count started growing as fast or faster than my post count, I started to feel like I was 'in public' and 'writing to an audience', and a large majority of the posts I consider important started to land in that 'fire' category. But I've only very rarely tried to monetize anything here, and I suspect it wouldn't work very well.

I think it's pretty natural for you as an author to engage with Tumblr primarily through longform text, but it is countervalent to the local culture. Part of that is just the usual dynamic where the most viral content is the most zippy, of course, and another part is that terrible thing that happened to all our attention spans in the 21st century. But there's also a genuine multimedia culture on this website in particular and among these people in particular. A Homestuck fan can and will read Ulysses if it's mixed in with a brightly colored collage of jpegs! I experimented with this myself (random examples), to the limits of my own style preferences, and I'm fairly sure that tossing in the occasional visual element has a pretty dramatic result. I do it somewhat sporadically, since it takes time away from writing per se, and growing a large audience on Tumblr isn't my goal, but it's still a mainstay when I'm consciously writing a 'science essay' as an artifact nominally intended for general audiences. A minor example of the many ways that social media offers us a devil's bargain, but I suppose that's true of art in general when you get right down to it. Anyway, it's there as an option if you want to prioritize building a fanbase here.

The biggest problem with Tumblr, as I mentioned earlier, is that trying to get money out of it is absolutely squeezing blood from a stone. The userbase is aging, but it's still dramatically skewed towards people that don't have a lot of disposable income or social prestige; an unavoidable side effect of being one of the last great pseudonymous social media sites is a selection bias in favor of people that gain little value from trading in their real names. That often means youth or poverty. It's part of what makes Tumblr so uniquely creative and quirky, and I've stayed because I'm so fond of that culture, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the site is far better suited to being a creative crucible than it is a source of revenue. This is the land of masks.

My 6-Week Tumblr Return Trial Period Is Up

Happy Autumn! Today is the Autumnal Equinox. (That is, if you're in the Pacific Daylight Time zone or earlier; it's actually tomorrow, the 23rd. The moment of equinox is 11:49 pm PDT this year.)

I came back to Tumblr six weeks ago (actually a little shy of seven weeks but six is the highest whole number) and said that I was going to give it consistent effort till the Equinox to see how I felt about it. Well, that day is today!

I've decided to significantly reduce my Tumblr presence, but not go back to zero like before. I still plan to post at least once or twice a week, and more whenever the fancy catches me. I don't want to slow-roll you, so there's the bottom line.

For those interested, I thought I would talk about my experience since returning.

Why I Came Back

A few years ago on my birthday I set myself a challenge of posting in my journal every day for a year—which I more or less did, and then promptly stopped because it had been a laborious thing for me with limited rewards.

This year on my birthday I decided to try that challenge again, except this time "soft": no formal public announcement, and no penalty if I missed a day. Good thing, too, because I missed a day right away! 😅 But I definitely was doing more and better writing on my journal than I had been, and I liked that. Maybe there was a sweet spot between the strict artifice of one journal entry every day and the sad default of no entries for weeks.

Then, a few days into the challenge, I got the idea of diverting this energy away from my journal and into social media, to try and begin the long process of building an audience for my creative works. I recognize with some dread that when I eventually do finish my next novel, no one is going to read it—because no one is going to know it exists. But that's not set in stone; this is something platforms can help with! And you can't just build a platform overnight. You have to start well in advance. In this post-mainstream-publishing era where independent artists' only hope is to create their own following, I knew that I would have to at least try, if I wanted people to actually read my work.

Building a platform is something I had done years ago, around the time the Prelude to After The Hero was coming out, and I was hugely successful at that time in creating lots of content and lots of channels—i.e. the platform part. But I didn't actually get anywhere in building an audience. Then my life fell apart from multiple catastrophes in a short period, and for many years I had no ability to pursue "platform growth" at all.

But I have that ability again, at least temporarily, and maybe this time I could do better.

Marketing and being social are very hard for me. They don't come naturally to me and I am not good at them. But what I can do is write about my creative work, my life, my take on the world, and anything else that comes to mind. With any luck, that would attract some eyeballs. It's the same thing I was doing eight years ago in my platform-building work, but I could be smarter about it this time, and learn from my past mistakes, which involved a lot of wasted effort that no one ever saw. This time I could try going specifically where the people are: social media! Social media was a part of my original platform-building push eight years ago, but only on the periphery. This time I could put all my platform-building into it, and not all the different channels at once, but just in one single place. Concentrate all my effort on a single point!

So I chose Tumblr: the only social media platform that still seems to reward long-form, thoughtful content. (Not counting YouTube video content.) Facebook is definitely on the way out as a relevant social media network, Twitter was unusually toxic even before the idiot took over, and TikTok to put it politely is not my jam. But Tumblr...I still use Tumblr! I still read several people's pages, and have done so for many years.

I was never actually active on Tumblr as a creator myself. As far as posting my own content goes, my social media home has always been on Facebook (and, for a while, Google+). My "return" to Tumblr this summer wasn't really anything of the sort. Even though my account is many years old, this summer was my first time making a big effort here.

And here's what I learned.

What Worked and What Didn't

I went in with very low expectations. In other words, I didn't actually expect anyone to see my work. I expected to put in my six weeks, toil away in obscurity the whole time, and leave.

But a couple people did notice my return, and reblogged my early posts, and between them they had enough followers that their reblogs got me a small influx of followers. (Hi!) So there were eyeballs, at least. I wasn't talking to the wall. It was a good bet that anything I wrote would at least have a chance of being seen by multiple other people.

A good start!

I set about trying to learn about the Tumblr algorithm and people's usage patterns. I learned that there is a very strong signal to set apart the content that people enjoy seeing and the content they don't. On the scale of Zero to Fire, a lot of what I wrote was either hard Zero or pretty decently Fire.

In the Zero category: My short-form humor was dead on arrival. So was my Tolkienian vocabulary series. My fat liberation essay—by far the biggest effortpost I made during my six weeks here—attracted a single troll and no legitimate engagement whatsoever. At 7700 words I doubt many people even read it. Cool art reblogs were also pretty much a Zero. The people in my tiny audience don't want to see any of this stuff, at least not from me.

In the Fire category: People liked my hot takes on copyright law, left-handedness, rationalist-adjacent topics and framings, some personal anecdotes (but not others), and—most promisingly—some of my discussion about the mechanics of authoring and writing, including topics such as redemption arcs, body diversity representation, losing interest in one's own stories, and long sentences. To the extent I am going to attempt to build a larger Tumblr following over time, this "mechanics of authoring" area is probably where I will focus my primary aim.

Not everything was Zero or Fire. There were also some posts in the middle. My posts actually discussing my own work, The Curious Tale and Galaxy Federal, landed in this space. They mostly fell flat for my general audience, but did noticeably better than the hard Zero stuff due to the consistent engagement of a tiny handful of fans. (Thank you, especially you Fip!)

In terms of financial support, six weeks of content creation on Tumblr yielded no book sales and no new patrons on my Patreon fund, though I did get one pledge increase from an existing patron! This isn't a big surprise, since I didn't make any push to attract new patrons and have made no attempt to hide that my book is also available for free. Still, zero is a noticeable number.

What Tumblr Feels Like

I'll be honest with you: I don't really "do" social media. I never have. I don't like social media. I am a creature of individual websites, web journals / blogs, and message forums. Facebook is the social network I use most (if you don't count YouTube), and my Facebook is set up more like a walled garden than a social network node—i.e., it is almost completely restricted to the people on my deliberately-short friends' list. I use it to look at cool pictures of clouds and landscapes, learn about things going on in my city, and keep in touch with friends. I've never really been one to use social media the way it is intended these days.

Nevertheless: Of all the social networks, I've always had a comparatively positive view of Tumblr. Tumblr is where freaks and weirdos come to be freaky and weird, and I love it. (Sometimes in principle more than practice, but still.) There used to be a tumblr called "Fuck Yeah Fat Upper Arms," and that was what I would point to whenever I had to explain to someone why I love Tumblr.

I also know there are notorious amounts of drama and pettiness on Tumblr, but in my experience it isn't so hard to just sidestep it most of the time. Also, I don't follow all that many people, so I probably just don't see much of this stuff in the first place.

When I returned to Tumblr I am pleased to say that it was basically what I hoped for: lots of wonderful niche and countercultural stuff; really thoughtful discussions that get a lot more depth here than almost anyplace else I've seen; and amazing art and fanart. There were lots of takes I didn't like, of course. Lots of stuff that rubbed me wrong. And the drama is definitely alive and well. But that's just life, right? As amplified by social media in all its unnuanced might. On the whole, I have enjoyed my time spent browsing Tumblr these past six weeks.

One thing actually did bring down my spirits about this place, though, and it has nothing to do with drama or takes I don't like: Tumblr feels kind of addictive. Like a giant industrial vat full of churning slurry, and if you fall in there's no getting out. I have an addictive personality, not to booze or drugs (as far as I know) but to content sources, specifically "content-firehose" websites that always have new things to read. I was stuck on GameFAQs for years back in the day, long after it had become a net-negative for me. Right now my big content addiction is Reddit, and it's definitely a net negative in my life for all the time it wastes for so little in return. And there have been many other content addictions in the years between. It's very hard for me to leave a content-firehose website once I've gotten sucked into it. And I really, really don't want to get sucked into Tumblr.

Like, this place is genuinely cool, but it doesn't "do it" for me like it did the last time I paid close attention to it. Fuck Yeah Fat Upper Arms is gone, and with it the innocence of my youth. Social media just isn't my scene, and returning to Tumblr has definitely given me the impression that I've "outgrown" it altogether. (I wrote a few days ago about one of the reasons why I think this.) I don't particularly want to spend a lot of time here. I don't have that content addiction to Tumblr yet, and I can feel myself actively straining to avoid developing it every time I'm on here. That's why I've only been reading my dashboard a few times a week.

I'm not saying social media is something juvenile that everyone is supposed to outgrow; I'm just talking about my own preferences and issues. My ideal use case for Tumble is to check in with Tumblr periodically and see new Samus Aran fanart and hot takes on cool things I've never heard about or thought deeply enough about. But, in practice, reading my Tumblr dashboard feels like dipping my feet in that vat of slurry I mentioned: It's very time-consuming and a lot of the stuff I see I don't really "need" in my life.

This six-week experiment has actually helped me to realize that, going forward, I should be looking to use social media less in my life, not more. It isn't just all-consuming and energy-draining; it has become kind of evil over the years. Tumblr isn't nearly as bad as some of the worst offenders, but on the whole we're slowly being pushed to use these services in very particular ways, ways which degrade us, and it's nefarious. Not just the abuse of our personal information and privacy, but the way we spend our time and think about the world. Social media seems to be making society actively worse on the whole, and that's down to the profit motives of the people who make the rules about how these services operate. It's probably not a coincidence that Tumblr, as one of the least-problematic major social networks, is also not particularly profitable.

I have lamented for years that I wish we would go back to individual people's websites and enthusiast–owned-and-operated message forums. I really think that this viewpoint is not just my nostalgia glasses talking; I think the individual websites paradigm was a better way of experiencing the Internet and interacting with each other. But while I can't do much to change society's patterns in general, I can at least be deliberate about how I engage with social media myself. And I think I'm going to be doing less of that as time goes on.

My actual public face is my Live Journal, even though it has languished for years. Either it or some successor blog is likely to be an ongoing constant for the rest of my life. I hope people will gradually find me there.

The Long Game

You're not gonna build an audience in six weeks. I know that. Also, in my time here, I've only done one of the two things that one needs to do to build an audience on social media: I've created content. I think my content has been more or less decent. (You can tell me if you think otherwise.)

What I haven't done is heavily engage with other content creators. I haven't done many reblogs; I've done zero asks; and I don't follow other tumblrs in a businesslike mindset of network—I only follow the ones I think I might like to read.

If I were to continue, the next step in my trial period would be a 3-month experiment. I've had enough success here in the past six weeks to justify dedicating another three months of my life to daily Tumblr posts if I want.

In that time I would need to focus more on the "networking" side of social networking. On the content side, I would continue trying to figure out what people like to see and what they don't. But it's the networking stuff that would be next in line for my full attention.

I'm also aware that all of my data are biased by the small size of my audience and the nonrandom composition of it. There is a danger in optimizing for that, from a long-term scalability and optimization standpoint. My social networking efforts would have to be geared toward diversifying my audience as much as growing it, because the truth of the matter is that I don't know yet who "my" audience truly is. Most of the people here now are people who are here because they like other creators and respected those people's recommendations—not because they necessarily like my art. The poor showing of my posts discussing my art kind of speak to that point.

So the question is, do I have a 3-month trial period in me? Or even just another 6-week period?

And that's a really tough question. I need to be writing my books, and I need to be paying my rent, and when I'm here on Tumblr I'm not doing either of those things. The best-case scenario is that by being here I'm setting myself up to pay future rents and have more available time for future creative writing. But in the meantime there are rents coming due in the immediate future, and my mental bandwidth is sickly and limited.

Is Tumblr even the place to build my audience? It might not be! It might be YouTube. It probably is YouTube. But Tumblr isn't nothing, and writing short essays is a hell of a lot faster than producing videos. A few loyal Tumblr followers might be just the pop I would need to get a future YouTube effort off to a running start.

One of my flaws as an entrepreneur is that I hate thinking like one when it comes to this whole sales / engagement / audience-building / marketing stuff. I like thinking about people as people, not as economic partners whose tastes and needs I must carefully accommodate to in order to hopefully earn a living from this someday. And I don't like thinking about my own content here as "content." I hate that word. But I am under no illusions about why I am here. I am not here for fun. I've done my Live Journal "for fun" for twenty years (as of last month!) and I have no audience to show for it. Growing an audience is not about having fun. Bonus points if you can manage to have fun along the way, but what it's really about is giving people an experience that they enjoy and want more of.

Social media is a hungry beast, a dehumanizing force (in my view), and an algorithmic rat race. I would much rather create content on my own terms, rather than try to play the social media game. This is one of the many reasons why I am so bad at the whole marketing side of building a business. Successful entrepreneurs dive right into it and give the people what they want. Like that "emotional damage" mate on YouTube: He gave an interview talking about how he just tried different schticks, not even comedy per se, until he found something that worked on people.

In an ideal world, when my next book is finished I could just press a button and everyone in the world know about its existence, and everyone who is interested could buy it and read it. But in the real world, you have to peck and scrape your way to attention, and I'm just so bad at this that it discourages me from even making the attempt.

So, adding it all up, what I come up with is that it would be wasteful for me to just abruptly give up on Tumblr as suddenly as I returned to it. I've started a ball rolling here, and I can build on that beginning if I want. But I also don't think that people need to hear from me on a daily basis. I'm probably not doing myself any favors by posting effortful content every day, not just in terms of my own sustainability but in terms of the algorithms of Tumblr and the mental bandwidth of my readers.

So I've come to the conclusion that Tumblr is probably not where my audience is going to be built, if indeed I ever manage to build one. But there is some potential here, and, more importantly, this is where the vast majority of my current fans are.

Ergo, going forward I will be reducing my posting frequency to a target of once or twice per week, plus whatever extras I see fit to add. I will continue to test out different types of content to see what catches interest. And I will start playing that social networking game that I dread so much, and try to engage more with others and hawk myself far and wide without looking like I'm trying to hawk myself, because for all that we claim to live in an age of sincerity we absolutely don't, and we will see where things go.

I will revisit this at Halloween, and see how I feel about it.

In the meantime, I will try to take some of this bandwidth I am freeing up and allocate it to other audience-building work. More on that as I have it for you!

If you made it this far, thanks for reading and for giving me some of your time. Please please please do give me some feedback if there's anything you want to know or want to see me discuss.