#cultural analytics

[pop-punklouis]

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[divinekangaroo]

Was thinking a bit deeper on @deadendtracks query https://www.tumblr.com/divinekangaroo/740003125539307520/i-clipped-this-from-your-post-because-its-easier?source=share

Snipped for sex talk, and also to spare any disinterested parties my naiveity on complex matters such as: subaltern/Orientalism/exoticism/Othering/ethnic talk etc

In hindsight I think I answered that query as a ‘possible authorial intent’ - speculatively, to subvert the usual gangster trope by displaying macho-ish behaviours (sex! whores!) but flipping motivation and outcome.

But there's also something else that's been churning away at the back of my head, the term subaltern. "the most powerless people living within the socio-economic confines of imperialism" -- and this imperialist overlay that often assigns the devious, deviant, dark, scheming/conniving/machavellian/feminine characteristics to the subaltern man, too, because it is exotic.

I haven't properly structured an argument around this; I feel a lot of T's approach to sex has that almost woman-coded thing to it, as signifiers of an even-further-disadvantaged man. It nags at me and feels that this also ties into this subaltern, semi-'Orientalist' / exotic layer he has as 'lower than the lowest class' / 'actually so low class he's outside of class' Romani character -> less of a stereotype, more of a conscious consideration of "if you have nothing, you will use everything you can, and sometimes that includes your own body, and guess what here's the bind: that kinda puts you even *lower* in the hierarchy, because women are lower than men and only women use their bodies that way!"

Gut instinct, barely unpacked: there's an imperialist/cultural/ethnic trauma that feels like it can't be detached from Tommy's sexuality/approach to sex any more than the hints of childhood trauma or abuse can be, either. Especially when you consider childhood as his closest time still connected to the living Romani culture, as opposed to by the time we see him on screen when his interactions with his culture are static and based on childhood/broken memories. I was initially put off by the Romani layer because it felt like a stereotype - gangs followed ethnic lines so let's just apply an ethnicity that's ~exotic~ - but the later series re-frame the earlier approach into something that shows it was almost never intended to be a representation of the culture but rather, more like Tommy's particular (distorted, damaged) view.

----

But then also answering the personal side of the question RE: Tommy's character. What does it mean for a person/individual to be so transactional and detached from sex yet participatory towards it?

This gets a little more headcanon-y:

T started having sex or being sexualised (seeing/experiencing sex) really young in a less than affectionate way - more like, here is a thing that must be done for some other action to happen (or be diverted).

Because of this, I can’t ever see him permitting himself to perform that ‘hungry to totally surrender his control and desires to someone else’ role so frequently given to him in fanon. What happened with Tatiana was an exception, not a rule. It’s nice to read for various reasons, but I'm unlikely to personally lean into this take. Not to say he's dominating or must be fully in control during sex, either, just that I think he'd avoid leaning into surrender because it'd be like losing total control of a transaction and becoming far too vulnerable.

Despite that I do feel he has an urge for connection/intimacy, I think he struggles with actually connecting deeply with people, reading sexual cues/flirtation or the like. In some ways, he connects too deeply and therefore holds back? I did have thoughts along the asexual line. He likes certain people, and he mostly enjoys the physical act of sex, and these two things can overlap to ‘I would like sex with this certain person’, but there’s a big gap between the two. Deep connection is unrelated to sex. Can't read flirt cues to the point he leapfrogs straight to the 'do you want to fuck?' almost as an abstraction because he can never decode the in-between steps?

Notwithstanding any deep connection, sex is still considered/framed as duty and obligation. His approach with Lizzie in S6 as case in point; he is conscious of his role and considers it a thing that must be performed to satisfy that role. Even S5, it feels like a 'seal the deal' sex exchange; he knows she likes it, she just told him so and that it's important to her, so all right, he's going to let loose.

This difficulty with 'is this connection? not sure?' is one reason why I think he is mostly about family (he can take connection for granted and has had a really really long time to build it). He also has a surprisingly large *respectful* but superficial network (he knows the right behaviours but rarely gets personal), very few close friends (honestly is this just Alfie? Maybe, once, Freddie and Barney? even Johnny Dogs and Uncle Charlie are subordinate). Which lends itself very effectively to leadership, to be honest, but also loneliness: again it feels like he's performing connection.

I really struggle with picturing him feeling much physical attraction without consciously focusing on it. He seems to spark for people (or maybe situations/dynamics - classy women?) not their physical, and when I’m in headcanon mode, it’s familiarity that builds his fondness for certain aspects of a person's physicality, rather than their physicality attracting him initially. So either he wants sex (release) and it's not really relevant who with, or he wants the person and sex is acceptable/better with that person. And there's a conscious switch in his head like, "ok now paying attention to physical attraction because must have sex" or "switch it off not important right now"

[dangerous-advantage]

concerning the new changes (07.10.23)

all right fuck it i wasn't gonna do this but then i ended up filling the tags on the post i reblogged.

so here's my thoughts on staff's 'Tumblr's Core Product Strategy" post and the things that i think could actually be good!... if staff respects tumblr's culture in implementing them.

to note, i am referring to this post. for better context, please go read the whole thing and try not to skip details, since i think it's important to understand the post through your own perspective if you want to participate in the conversation.

this post worried me at first, both because changes in the tumblr ecosystem with as much weight as this post carries have, historically, been pretty bad for the userbase.

starting off with a focus on creating a larger user base and inviting more, new creators rather than with a strong plan to focus on improving the current state of tumblr sets off alarm bells.

reading through the rest of it leaves me with... mixed thoughts. while it honestly does seem like they've heard a lot of the things we've been screaming at them about and might actually take steps to make things improve, i'm still wary.

this isn't a post explaining specific changes tumblr plans to implement. in fact, there are relatively few examples of actual strategies being communicated. it's just an overview with a lot of implications for the future.

i mean, not even the new tumblr labs group has any idea what the exact changes are going to be. just look at this:

[ID: A screenshot containing text from a post made by the aforementioned account. It reads, "But we're not sure exactly what that change looks like, so we've assembled a new team, called Tumblr Labs, to figure it out as quickly..." It cuts off here. /End ID]

and i think that's the problem.

so, the post. staff explains that the issue, as they see it, is that the platform is fundamentally flawed-- i.e., because tumblr is difficult to use if you don't have an understanding of the site before, it tends to scare off new users rather than encourage engagement.

this isn't untrue. however, it should be noted, the tumblr userbase has cultivated a culture of teaching newcomers how the website and the website's culture functions. (see: the many posts made as 'guides' in the wake of the twitter and reddit fiascos, as well as @/strange-aeon's video on the topic.)

(not to say that this system isn't imperfect and could be improved by directing new users to the these posts, buuuuuuut i'll get into that later.)

now: i (and i think most of the userbase) agree with staff on the main point-- tumblr, as a platform, is broken. we have long complained about the bugs and the messy reblog chains and the notifications overwhelming you if a post gains traction.

(though, we've also just integrated that into tumblr culture, but that's a tangent for a different time.)

here's the thing: staff does mention these things as problems they want to fix.

here's a short list of some things the post mentions that i honestly agree are a problem, and that a lot of people have wanted to see change!

[ID: Screenshots of items taken from the bulleted lists on staff's post. These read as follows: "Improving Tumblr's search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards." "Making it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread." "Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral." "Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.""Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users." /End ID]

again, these are things that i agree are issues and would be cool to see improved upon. but staff doesn't tell us how they plan to do this.

in staff's response to the userbases' assumption that they're going to remove the reverse-chronological dashboard, they state they're 'surprised' users came away with this assumption.

i, for one, am not.

the relationship between tumblr staff and the tumblr collective has been strained for a long time. mounting frustrations about users' actual issues with the website being ignored while new features are implemented that are almost unanimously disliked doesn't help.

and don't forget, the last time a change as drastic as this post is making it seem came into action, the porn ban was implemented. a change that had an overall negative effect on the community and tumblr's culture at large. it tore away crucial aspects of tumblr's identity that we'll probably never get back.

so while this post does address issues users have wanted to see fixed, of course we're still going to be wary.

the bottom line is, users don't trust staff to implement changes that will be beneficial to improving the platform for the tumblr userbase. (the recent reddit and twitter debacles don't help things much, either.)

i think staff needs to realize, as the final poster put it, tumblr already has innate value. value created by the community.

if staff focuses on improving tumblr to be easier to use-- in accordance with elevating tumblr's culture-- it will attract more people, simply by being less broken all the time.

this brings me to the other (main) issue i have: putting new users first over the current userbase.

this may not have been what staff meant to imply, but the emphasis seems to be on improving the userbase for incoming users, rather than those of us who are already here.

to be clear, i don't think that making tumblr easier to navigate for new users is bad. i mean, there's a reason we were writing guides. joining tumblr if you aren't already exposed to it can be daunting.

allowing new users to rely on an actual, working algorithm (although i think a user-driven algorithim is possibly one of the best parts of tumblr) isn't inherently bad. using that algorithim to elevate new creators isn't bad, either.

it's the way they choose to do this that makes us wary. like i mentioned before, we already have somewhat of a system for on-boarding new users to the site: word of mouth from more experienced users. this helps with both learning how to navigate tumblr and introducing new users to tumblr culture.

with all this in mind: where do we go from here?

in my mind, the solution for these problems comes down to communication. if staff wants more trust from the tumblr userbase, they need to show they are willing to listen to feedback from the tumblr collective.

when implementing changes, a great way to avoid the immediate backlash and distrust of tumblr users is by clearly outlining the changes they plan to make and the strategies by which they will be carried out.

another user made the analogy that websites should be like cities, where the users have a say in (as staff puts it) the 'evolution of tumblr.'

(mmmmmaybe we could use that spiffy new poll feature, too? everybody loves polls!)

for on-boarding new users, staff could take inspiration from the userbase in implementing a system by which new users are given the information needed to navigate tumblr. tidy up the site, remove bugs, and make it easier to use, and a lot of problems will sort themselves out.

then, we can go from there.

regarding the rest of the stuff i brushed over, i don't feel i can really say much without knowing what they actually plan to do, or where they plan to go with these things.

for example, here's another list of images of things from the post that i am cautiously intrigued by, but am worried will be improved for the worse:

[ID: Another series of images, showing more of the items listed in staff's post. They read as follows: "Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs." "Get creators' new content in front of people who are interested in it." "Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting." "Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs." "Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds." /End ID.]

the bottom line is this: if staff wants the support of the userbase in upcoming changes, they need to show that they respect and value us and the culture at large. in my opinion, staff has made strides in embracing tumblr culture, but we need to know these changes are not just motivated by profit.

if staff intends to keep it's current users, they need to to recognize that we deserve a say in this, too.

without the userbase, tumblr wouldn't exist. end of story. we are what keep tumblr alive. as stated before, expanding the userbase is not a bad thing. but doing so to the detriment of tumblr's culture is.

in this regard, i do truly hope that staff means what they said in the conclusion of their original post:

[ID: An image of the conclusion of staff's post. It reads: "Our mission has always been to empower the world's creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that priotitizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we--" The words then cut off. /End ID]

so, @staff. if you really do believe this: prove it.

[piqtescue]

so basically all of my timeline data in google- every step ive taken with every phone ive had since 2016, is going to be deleted as they migrate away from the web version.... big fuck you to Google. Huge, huge fuck you

ive got the JSON backup obviously, but fuck if I know or even want to implement that into a map-based environment- this literally makes me want to fucking piss on their entire business

[l0vefreak]

The THING about utena “massive trigger warning + changed my life” posting is the secondary characteristic of irony being deep truth. Like girlhood is dominated by allusions to and obfuscations of rape and the threat of rape. The impropriety of exposing young children to the concept puts them in greater danger. It happens to them but they don’t understand it. And this runs so deep it becomes fantastical - without direct language, children pick up on the taboo of the unsaid and apply otherworldly power to it.

[unityrain24]

back to the grind -_-....

[muirneach]

every time i can tell that im being too much of a hater on here im like. okay im taking a step back i will become zen. but it never sticks. cest la vie as they say

[earthytzipi]

Christians and culturally Christian atheists figure out how to stop proselytizing challenge

[fragmentedblade]

I hope hope hope they give Baiheng more personality and depth than just being the sunshine friend who died

[aeide-thea]

the eternal, often-unsuccessful struggle to separate 'hm i personally am not enjoying Thing because it smacks of Unpleasantness to me' from 'i actually dislike Thing because it's Inherently Problematic, amazing how my personal taste is an unfailing radar that way' 😔

[whypolar]

There are readings that are more supported than others, there are themes and foreshadowing, there is criticism, there is authorial intent... but sometimes a disagreement about a piece of media just isn't about "media literacy". Sometimes someone will interpret things differently than you because they are a different person with different personal taste, life experience, and beliefs

This is obvious. Sorry. I just saw one too many "the text objectively agrees with me, media literacy is dead" statements about things that were not at all that clear-cut today.

For ongoing series in particular, I am always braced for the moment this can turn into "getting blisteringly mad when it turns out the text did not actually agree with me and betrays my expectations by doing something different"

What I'm saying is I need to stay off twitter

[un-pearable]

got really mad and anthropological out of nowhere in my drafts . i gotta read theory or smthn again so im not just talking out my ass

[grandhotelabyss]

The day after Trump's election, I wrote a correspondent that it was time for the left to stop reading Marx and start reading Jung. I think I had in mind "meme magic" rather than materialism as an answer to "what's the matter with Kansas" type questions. These things come in heaven's own time—I only read Answer to Job myself in those years—so here we are at last: "Carl Jung Solves the Culture War."

Angie Speaks—who seems to have taken the full hero's journey of our ideological decade, from 2016 Chapo-to-BreadTube socialism through 2020 Red-Scare-adjacent reaction to arrive at what I was calling "ironic metaphysical quietism" the other day (though Jung perhaps lacks irony, one advantage Freud enjoys over his rebellious pupil)—explicating our occult psychologist at his most overtly gnostic to heal our riven culture.

Why, by the way, can we not understand ourselves without reading German-language thinkers of the 1792-1945 period? Modernity in its different manifestations detonated in England, France, and Germany first—as Lenin put it, summarizing Marx's canon: English economics, French politics, and German philosophy. Germany, construing itself as modernity's first victim, the first "colony" in the metaphysical sense indicated by words like "postcolonial" and "decolonial," philosophized itself into either arch-resistance to or arch-fulfillment of modernity, these being the divergent paths of Jung and Freud, as in Anselm Kiefer's schematic painting German Lineages of Salvation, a picture worth a thousand books, though it sadly and mysteriously omits Freud, who belongs in the bright rainbow with Marx and Hegel, not in the murky river with Jung and Heidegger. I'm no longer sure if this is the most relevant division today, however, in the present epistemic freefall. Of the trinity Marx-Nietzsche-Freud, it seems to me that only Nietzsche still speaks to us with undiminished relevance, whereas Marx and Freud, as materialists, the one with his implied "existence precedes essence" and the other with his overt "anatomy is destiny," can't deal with the vertiginous autonomy of consciousness loosed by today's culture and technology, thus we tend, for example, to seek Freud's Oedipus (Jung) and Marx's Laius (Hegel) instead. In a final and deeply ironic tribute to Marx and Freud, however, this is itself something of a materialist explanation.

Anyway, I don't like to read philosophy or psychology—poems and novels usually do the trick (why always Marx-Nietzsche-Freud? what about Goethe-Kafka-Mann or Hölderlin-Rilke-Celan?)—and don't even entirely know what I'm talking about, so I'm glad we have YouTubers to read it and explain it to us instead.

[kisskisskisskisskiss]

The comments and replies on this are astounding like why in the actual fuck are you all fighting like children on a topic this complex.

Like please for the love of god stop fuckin fighting over this girl math shit. Do you all realize that the point of cultural analysis and critique is to point out patterns in culture and why they exist and not use them to attack others and that the reason it will not convince anyone is bc they can use the same shit or make their own critiques back? Like we live in a culture obsessed with this notion that there is a Science to Existence when culture very clearly can never be boiled down to something that concrete.

Your views on this trend if "girlification" hold meaning and are important but they dont make you more correct or morally superior. You are not a better person for hating these trends but also if you are taking these critiques personally maybe you need to uhhh....get a fucking grip? And maybe look inward and understand why you are so attached to these ideas of femininity and, if you really see it as survival or reclaimation, why do you feel the need to scream and cry and act fucking insane online about it?????

Its even fuckin weirder that any of yall arguing about it are doing it through this lense that you are more Right for it. It's like you have genuinely zero understanding of experiences outside your own but instead of trying to use that to grow, you're getting into screaming matches on tumblr and twitter about it like a bunch of babies.

"girl dinner is when you don't eat teehee" "men think about the roman empire women think about their ex best friends and poetry" "✨sapphic love✨ is so pure and innocent and sweet unlike nasty gross Man Lust" "girl math is when you can buy starbucks and makeup because you didn't buy it yesterday so it's free" "I'm going to explain (complex topic) for the girlies! so basically it's like when you go shopping-" "I love women because they're so soft and smooth and feminine and we can talk about girly things and they're not sweaty or hairy or horny like gross men" "women should be unemployed girls don't need jobs men should do all that for us" "ugh girls that don't like pink or being feminine just need to stop being such pick mes and get over their internalized misogyny it's gross"

god save my hairy dyke ass from this hell before I start whacking people's shins with my Girl Baseball Bat. teehee!

[jcmarchi]

SMART researchers develop a method to enhance effectiveness of cartilage repair therapy

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/smart-researchers-develop-a-method-to-enhance-effectiveness-of-cartilage-repair-therapy/

SMART researchers develop a method to enhance effectiveness of cartilage repair therapy

Researchers from the Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (CAMP) interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, alongside collaborators from the National University of Singapore Tissue Engineering Programme, have developed a novel method to enhance the ability of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) to generate cartilage tissue by adding ascorbic acid during MSC expansion. The research also discovered that micro-magnetic resonance relaxometry (µMRR), a novel process analytical tool developed by SMART CAMP, can be used as a rapid, label-free process-monitoring tool for the quality expansion of MSCs.

Articular cartilage, a connective tissue that protects the bone ends in joints, can degenerate due to injury, age, or arthritis, leading to significant joint pain and disability. Especially in countries — such as Singapore — that have an active, aging population, articular cartilage degeneration is a growing ailment that affects an increasing number of people. Autologous chondrocyte implantation is currently the only Food and Drug Administration-approved cell-based therapy for articular cartilage injuries, but it is costly, time-intensive, and requires multiple treatments. MSCs are an attractive and promising alternative as they have shown good safety profiles for transplantation. However, clinical use of MSCs is limited due to inconsistent treatment outcomes arising from factors such as donor-to-donor variability, variation among cells during cell expansion, and non-standardized MSC manufacturing protocols.

The heterogeneity of MSCs can lead to variations in their biological behavior and treatment outcomes. While large-scale MSC expansions are required to obtain a therapeutically relevant number of cells for implantation, this process can introduce cell heterogeneity. Therefore, improved processes are essential to reduce cell heterogeneity while increasing donor cell numbers with improved chondrogenic potential — the ability of MSCs to differentiate into cartilage cells to repair cartilage tissue — to pave the way for more effective and consistent MSC-based therapies.

In a paper titled “Metabolic modulation to improve MSC expansion and therapeutic potential for articular cartilage repair,” published in the scientific journal Stem Cell Research and Therapy, CAMP researchers detailed their development of a priming strategy to enhance the expansion of quality MSCs by modifying the way cells utilize energy. The research findings have shown a positive correlation between chondrogenic potential and oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS), a process that harnesses the reduction of oxygen to create adenosine triphosphate — a source of energy that drives and supports many processes in living cells. This suggests that manipulating MSC metabolism is a promising strategy for enhancing chondrogenic potential.

Using novel PATs developed by CAMP, the researchers explored the potential of metabolic modulation in both short- and long-term harvesting and reseeding of cells. To enhance their chondrogenic potential, they varied the nutrient composition, including glucose, pyruvate, glutamine, and ascorbic acid (AA). As AA is reported to support OXPHOS and its positive impact on chondrogenic potential during differentiation — a process in which immature cells become mature cells with specific functions — the researchers further investigated its effects during MSC expansion.

The addition of AA to cell cultures for one passage during MSC expansion and prior to initiation of differentiation was found to improve chondrogenic differentiation, which is a critical quality attribute (CQA) for better articular cartilage repair. Longer-term AA treatment led to a more than 300-fold increase in the yield of MSCs with enhanced chondrogenic potential, and reduced cell heterogeneity and cell senescence — a process by which a cell ages and permanently stops dividing but does not die — when compared to untreated cells. AA-treated MSCs with improved chondrogenic potential showed a robust shift in metabolic profile to OXPHOS. This metabolic change correlated with μMRR measurements, which helps identify novel CQAs that could be implemented in MSC manufacturing for articular cartilage repair.

The research also demonstrates the potential of the process analytical tool developed by CAMP, micromagnetic resonance relaxometry (μMRR) — a miniature benchtop device that employs magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) imaging on a microscopic scale — as a process-monitoring tool for the expansion of MSCs with AA supplementation. Originally used as a label-free malaria diagnosis method due to the presence of paramagnetic hemozoin particles, μMRR was used in the research to detect senescence in MSCs. This rapid, label-free method requires only a small number of cells for evaluation, which allows for MSC therapy manufacturing in closed systems — a system for protecting pharmaceutical products by reducing contamination risks from the external environment — while enabling intermittent monitoring of a limited lot size per production.

“Donor-to-donor variation, intrapopulation heterogeneity, and cellular senescence have impeded the success of MSCs as a standard of care therapy for articular cartilage repair. Our research showed that AA supplementation during MSC expansion can overcome these bottlenecks and enhance MSC chondrogenic potential,” says Ching Ann Tee, senior postdoc at SMART CAMP and first author of the paper. “By controlling metabolic conditions such as AA supplementation, coupled with CAMP’s process analytical tools such as µMRR, the yield and quality of cell therapy products could be significantly increased. This breakthrough could help make MSC therapy a more effective and viable treatment option and provide standards for improving the manufacturing pipeline.”

“This approach of utilizing metabolic modulation to improve MSC chondrogenic potential could be adapted into similar concepts for other therapeutic indications, such as osteogenic potential for bone repair or other types of stem cells. Implementing our findings in MSC manufacturing settings could be a significant step forward for patients with osteoarthritis and other joint diseases, as we can efficiently produce large quantities of high-quality MSCs with consistent functionality and enable the treatment of more patients,” adds Professor Laurie A. Boyer, principal investigator at SMART CAMP, professor of biology and biological engineering at MIT, and corresponding author of the paper.

The research is conducted by SMART and supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program.

[kavehater]

I’m so lucky to not fully understand wth these Arabs are crying abt talking abt khaleeji and oil Arab GIRL 😭 cause if I knew what they were talking abt ppl would’ve had their noses sucker punched right off their faces by yours truly like TF you mean Iraq isn’t a gulf country or khaleeji what the actual fuck 😭