#especially since twitter users moved back here

[quotevarchive]

hey just a general tip for people moving from quotev to tumblr

reblogs > likes

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

https://x.com/lyokangirl/status/1800137471067603338?t=aOY0BrrgBo2CnqzAQrtY4A&s=19

The whole thread 🤔🤔🤔

Disclaimer first: I looked at this tweet when I saw anon's ask super early this morning. The original tweet that started this thread has now been deleted but it was a tweet containing this image from Matta of Fact's instagram stories:

Here is a screenshot with the twitter thread responding to a tweet that posted the above screenshot. I've redacted all the usernames (personal policy) but if you go to the URL in the anon's ask, you'll see them.

(I cut the thread in half so the images would be bigger. Start on the left with the yellow user.)

If it's too difficult to read:

Yellow works close to the hospital in Matta's story (the MD Anderson Center in Houston, Texas), which is probably the best hospital for cancer treatment and research in the world and treats people from all over the world. She thinks it's unlikely that Kate is in Texas getting treatment because she's been spotted in the UK but if she is getting treatment from the US, then strict medical privacy laws prohibit medical staff from talking about her (HIPAA) but it's curious no one else (ie other patients and hotel guests - the St. Regis mentioned in the reddit screenshot is a luxury hotel chain) have seen her.

Red is talking about how Kate and the BRF don't have the same expectation of personal privacy or a social contract here in the US that they would in the UK. In other words, UK media largely doesn't run pap/bystander photos of the royal family when they're not working. That's not true here in the US. Not only would American media print those photos, most Americans wouldn't have any problem taking those photos of Kate in the first place, especially if they can make a quick buck or get social media clout.

Blue is worried about Kate and thinks this means the worst because she's trying to read between the lines. Yellow is trying to talk her out of panic.

I don't think this is true, for a number of reasons.

First, I don't trust Matta as a source. Never have, never will. She started out incredibly biased in favor of the Sussexes and while it looks like she's moved her coverage to become more neutral, I still can't shake her start as a Sussex Squaddie. As Maya Angelou said "when someone shows you who they are the first time, believe them."

Second, if it comes out that Kate, the Princess of Wales and the future Queen has abandoned the NHS or British care, she - and the BRF - can kiss the NHS charities, patronages, and support goodbye. Yes, the NHS is currently suffering and there's a whole bunch of controversy, but the royal family has stood by the NHS since the beginning. If it got out that they don't personally support the NHS...well, there's no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.

Third, yes, MD Anderson is considered one of the best, if not the best institution for cancer treatment and research in the world. They're part of the cancer moonshot initiative. People come from all over the world to use their facilities. And they send their people out to consult and teach all over the world as well. Kate, and the BRF, isn't risking her NHS support to fly halfway around the world. Especially if she's immuno-compromised, especially if she doesn't feel she is well enough or healthy-looking-enough for public engagements. Those doctors are coming to her.

Relatedly, Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace have been used as operating theaters and medical treatment spaces before. There's no need for Kate to go halfway around the world to a hospital when literally the hospital can come to her at Windsor Castle.

Now, is it possible she could've gone to Texas anyway? Yes, very much so. But my theory is, if she went in the first place, she went only once, to learn about her cancer and what her treatment options were, and then she went back to the UK. Why do I say this?

Because simply put: she has three school-aged children and kids talk. If Kate was spending all this time in the US, those kids would've said something to someone in that school community and it would've gotten out. After all, if someone's leaking Charlotte's cricket team schedule to social media, someone's going to leak any gossip they've heard about or from the children.

At the end of the day, you can believe whatever you see and however you interpret this. For me, I choose to believe the palace at their word over nameless internet strangers and a gossipmongerer. Maybe that makes me naive but it is what it is. The palace, and William, have said that Kate is doing well and is focused on her recovery and her family. We have no reason to believe that she's anywhere except where they've said she is: with her family in Windsor. We have no reason to believe her health isn't improving and that she isn't recovering because it would have been all over William's face the last few days (the man does not have a poker face at all) and it simply wasn't there.

I know people miss Kate. I know they'd like reassurance from her personally but that's not Kate's priority right now. Her priority is reassuring her children and being with them, as it should be. Let's give her the time, space, and privacy to do what she knows is right for her, and her family, and who knows. Maybe she'll surprise us in the coming weeks.

[virtualtadpole]

Thailand's "cute boy" craze: an explainer

Here's another repost from Reddit, originally from 2022. Since Perfect 10 Liners is currently airing with the "cute boy" page as a key plot point, this seems as good a time as any to re-share (remember that the original novel was first released in 2018). Sorry this one is a wall of text, I wasn't sure it'd be a good idea to include example photos involving people who weren't really public figures at the time.

Those of you following Thai BL will probably have come across this concept of "cute boy" social media fan pages, and might have wondered whether they're an actual thing. Or you may have heard of actors being one of their university's cute boys before joining the industry, and wondered what exactly that meant. Here's my attempt at an explanation.

The roots of the phenomenon go back at least to the popular Thai web forums of the 2000s, especially the youth-oriented Dek-D.com, one of Thailand's biggest and oldest web communities (also known as the web fiction platform which launched many BL novels). Dek-D's forums had a picture-sharing section, with a subsection dedicated to photos of cute guys and girls. It was still the early days of digital cameras and camera phones, and these posts were popular among the site's teen users. A few (mostly girls) who became noticed from these posts became Thailand's first "net idols", many of whom went on to join the entertainment industry.

The arrival of social networking sites around 2007 (first Hi5, then Facebook a few years later) helped facilitate these posts, as publicly posted photos became more easily accessible. The issue of privacy wasn't really on most people's minds then, and most of it was done in a light-hearted spirit. Being featured in these posts meant a boost in followers and online popularity, enabling more teens to become recognized as net idols, but it would be a few more years before this really meant anything. On the other hand, the social networking sites themselves would eventually bypass the traditional forums as a central venue for such posts, and an increasing number of Facebook pages (followed by dedicated Instagram and Twitter accounts) would be created to offer a curated experience instead.

The actual trend of "cute boy" pages took off in 2012, around the same time as the explosive growth of Instagram. Teens flocking to the platform (escaping Facebook, which was now full of parents) filled their public profiles with selfies and portraits of themselves, generating a steady stream of material that these pages could pick up to post and promote. This in turn gave the kids likes and followers, a mutually beneficial arrangement for most thanks to the platform's like-seeking culture.

Of course, not all of these proliferating pages featured teen boys. "Cute girl" pages have their share of followers, though they don't seem to be as visible or talked about, perhaps due to a combination of factors including the way society doesn't consider it as creepy for girls to openly ogle after boys compared to the opposite.

As competition grew, these pages diversified into several niches, including those covering specific schools and universities. Most of the school ones aren't that unusual, given that it's quite natural for students to talk about the popular boys and girls at school, and this had been a trend in school forums long before then. Most of them didn't last long though, as page administrators soon graduated and moved on.

However, things were different for certain high-profile schools, particularly the country's four oldest boys' schools, which participate in the biennial Jaturamitr football competition: Suankularb (SK), Debsirin (DS), Assumption (AC) and Bangkok Christian (BCC). The schools had always been well known, but the Instagram era launched an unprecedented wave of interest in their good-looking students, many of whom attracted huge numbers of followers just by being on Instagram. AC especially stands out in this regard, as Instagram allowed outsiders to glimpse into this exclusive boys' world that served as the basis of Love Sick, the source novel of which was begun in 2008.

Not only were cute boy pages created dedicated to these schools (some by outsiders), some of the boys became minor celebrities in their own right, with fans (mostly sao Y (the Thai term for fujoshi), and also some queer folk) meeting up with and photographing them in real life, especially at school events such as AC's Christmas fair and the Jaturamitr competition. And they were serious about it, coming equipped with professional DLSR cameras and huge telephoto lenses. The schools' student bodies leaned into this popularity, having the popular boys promote fundraising events and selling merchandise to their fans.

The relationship between the boys and their fans seemed to be mostly good, the boys appreciating the positive attention and the fans getting to stan someone much more accessible than the mainstream celebrity. And if they later became famous, then there's the pride of having known them before everyone else. These being sao Y, there sometimes is a bit of shipping, though mostly jokingly. Of course, this was not limited to boys from AC and the other Jaturamitr schools, but they were much more prominent.

This was the backdrop against which Love Sick launched its casting calls in 2014, which generated a huge amount of online buzz throughout the cute boy pages and fan Twitter. There's a reason the series featured such a huge cast with so many minor roles - to provide ample opportunity for fans to latch onto the actors and the show.

In some ways, the cute boy label served as a distancing from the previous term net idol, which by 2014 had begun to develop into a negative stereotype of people using their online fame to sell beauty products for easy profit, especially those livestreaming on emerging platforms such as Socialcam and Bigo Live and whose followers tended to be less sophisticated as opposed to the urban middle-class. Which is why most people appearing on cute boy pages tended to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and much more attention was given to those focusing on elite schools and universities.

At the university level, cute boy (or other similarly named) pages associated with the country's top universities became very prominent online and also offline, often collaborating with the universities' student bodies to promote events and sometimes also assisting in the universities' PR for prospective students. Many universities already had a pageant culture in one form or another, with which these pages tied in well. Most prominent among the pages were Chula Cute Boy and TU Sexy Boy of Chulalongkorn and Thammasat, the country's two oldest universities. The two universities have an annual traditional football match, which the Cute Boy and Sexy Boy pages played large parts promoting in recent years, and is another event that attracts many fangirls.

Some have argued that the net idol phenomenon serves as a democratization of the entertainment industry, opening up opportunities for aspirants to directly connect to audiences as opposed to the traditional model where everything depended on one being picked up by an agency. But it benefits the traditional model as well. While in the old days talent scouts would look for teens hanging out at Siam Square, today they only have to scan the cute boy pages. Many BL actors were discovered this way. Inn Sarin was a long-time favourite of Chula Cute Boy, and Up and Mix first became widely known from there as well. Many others have likewise previously been featured in various cute boy pages, and practically all of the younger actors who joined the industry more recently probably had strong followings before their debut.

But the craze might be coming to an end. While there have long been concerns over today's youth's obsession with looks, and the university cute boy pages have from the beginning been criticized for promoting shallow images of their universities at the expense of academic aspects, they didn't really have any effect on the trend. But this began to change in 2020, when a widespread youth protest movement swept through school and university campuses and liberal progressive ideas rose to the fore. The issue of "beauty privilege" became one of many perpetual topics of discussion, and many began calling for an end to university cute boy pages. Thammasat, long regarded as the university with the strongest student activism, saw the TU Sexy Boy page shutting down (though the admin cited personal reasons and it was never confirmed whether this was in response to the criticism). Many people seem to have stopped tweeting cute boy pictures since then.

On top of the political mood, the pandemic's disruption of normal school life also interrupted the cute boy momentum, as many photo opportunities dried up. Long-time page admins and fans outgrowing the topic and losing interest might also be a factor. The Chula Cute Boy page has also been inactive since late 2020, for undisclosed reasons.

The future seems at best unclear for now. There are still many active pages out there, but on the whole, from what I've seen, there does seem to be a loss of interest. If younger netizens are indeed disinclined to craze after them the same way, the era of cute boy pages might very well soon be over.

Or maybe they've just moved onto TikTok, and I haven't found out how.

----

In the above original post, I neglected to go into the phenomenon of real-people shipping, so I'm attaching this comment from later as an addendum:

Regarding real-people shipping, there are probably two lines of origin that influenced the practice. First is the rise of K-pop and the shipping culture that came with it, which led to a proliferation of online fanfiction in dedicated Thai web communities and a shipping culture forming around the reality singing competitions which were the talk-of-the-town entertainment programs in the 2000s. One of the first really famous shipped pairs was Nat and Tol from Academy Fantasia season 4 in 2007. (That is Nat Sakdatorn, whom you may recognize as the uncle from Never Let Me Go, among many other roles.)

The other origin is the rise of "net idols", which followed the arrival of social media sites (in Thailand this was led by Hi5 in 2006). I covered this in more detail in my post on Thailand's "cute boy" craze, but didn't really touch upon the shipping aspect. Indeed, a significant shipping culture did form (a few years later) around net idols/cute boys. At first this focused more on (people who were believed to be) real-life couples, like Both and Newyear, who became famous in 2012. From there, manufactured/imaginary couples naturally followed in hopes of cashing in on the popularity of such shipped pairs.

I'm a bit hazy on when the shipping of actors as couples actually became a regular thing in the BL industry. While the practice of fanservice moments on the promotion circuit go back at least to The Love of Siam, I don't think there was significant shipping of the actors' real-life persona, and the same seemed to be the case with Love Sick, especially after the series ended. The first actor pair to become shipped as such was probably Krist and Singto from SOTUS, and the practice quite definitely became a thing after that.

----

Postscript: Thanks for reading, and sorry the writing in this one isn't as good as the other posts I've shared. If you're interested in further reading on the topic, I can recommend the article The Yaoi Phenomenon in Thailand and Fan/Industry Interaction. (2019). Plaridel, 16(2), 63–89 by Assoc. Prof. Natthanai Prasannam, one of the leading Thai academics on BL/Y culture in Thailand.

[cleolinda]

Tumblr cannot replace Twitter, or Reddit, or Instagram, or Pinterest, or vice versa. I’m not saying it can. All these sites have their own functionalities and subcultures and mores. I miss Twitter. I’ve been missing Twitter since 2015, when the tone of the whole site started going to shit.

If you are moving to any platform, it is very appreciated to just hang out for a while and observe how people do things. You can go against the culture, but you’ll be consciously choosing to do things differently.

I’ve never watched one single second of Supernatural in my entire life. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like Supernatural. We get our news from the Destiel meme. That’s just how it is.

Yeah, when I posted about welcoming people from Reddit and Twitter, I was thinking in very naive and (help me, I can’t think of the word. Not provincial. “Relating to only that which is right in front of your face”) ways about redditors I had seen arrive from Tumblr-friendly subreddits, and Twitter users I personally interact with (because who else would see me tweeting about it). Dear God, no, I don’t want most of Reddit or Twitter coming over here. My apologies for saying otherwise.

Just before Reddit imploded, I had seen people here worrying that Tumblr really was dying and was so much quieter than it used to be, so an influx of the kind of people who would want to come to Tumblr seemed like a good thing.

When I said Tumblr has been less stressful for me, I completely forgot about the time I ended up with thousands of people yelling “kill yourself” about movie theater trash on a poll I made on a whim, for a solid week. Y’all, why do you keep doing that to each other, come on.

Still less stressful than Twitter, where potentially the whole planet (hyperbole) (maybe) could see anything you fucked up about if your fuckup went viral. Also, [gestures at everything]

I feel bad that I left Tumblr (as in, I made only a few reblogs a year) for a long while, but in my defense, it wasn’t because of the porn ban, and I wasn’t on Twitter much either. I had spinal surgery and covid and just Could Not for a few years. But I did, I admit, see that Muskrat was officially taking control of Twitter last year, and I jumped back on both sites in a panic to make sure I stayed in touch with people. So I did kind of leave and come back. I’d kept up with most of the memes, at least.

I feel like I earn my keep by reblogging a lot. Reblogging stuff, especially artists who post here, goes a long way.

[aroceu]

some thoughts on leaving a social media website...again

as of 10/16/2024, twitter has announced its intention to implement a new feature into the platform: instead of blocking allowing you to block certain accounts from viewing your profile if it's public, it now just... doesn't do that anymore. it only limits interaction. though this certainly isn't a surprise with musk's twitter rollouts since 2021—when i first saw people start to trickle out—this, in particular, breaks a lot of users boundaries and has prompted many to private their accounts and move to bluesky.

i'm in support of this, btw—the ceo of bsky is strongly opposed to ever running any sort of ads on the site ("won't enshittify the network with ads"), doesn't use any blockchain technology, and has a culture where supplying alt text on images is the norm. your main timeline is in reverse-chronological order (like intended), but there are other separate options to create a custom algorithmic feed for certain types of content, only if you wish to. though bsky is a work in progress, i have high hopes for what it can be in the future: that is, usable, practical, and more reminiscent of what it was like when twitter first started, than how twitter currently is.

but despite my love for bluesky, i won't spend too much time glazing yet another microblogging platform. instead, i'm here to ponder the concept of social media: why we have it, why we use it, and why these moves happen in the first place. people have been trickling in and out of twitter ever since the richest and evilest man in the world took possession of it; especially in a fandom sense, there's been a back and forth between twitter and tumblr due to tumblr's former porn ban, as well. we all have principles and morals that guide the decisions we make, including what websites we decide to use. they speak to a pattern of not only our culture as people at any given time—but how these platforms have the power to implement these changes whenever they want. and we, as individuals, must make decisions both based on those principles, but also our desires to fit in.

i'll start off by saying this—eventually i'm going to start talking about what social media means for creatives. but there is in fact an extremely well-written article about this already that goes into more detail. if you're more interested in that, let me direct you there first: R U AN ARTIST ON SOCIAL MEDIA??? by omoulo

with that out of the way, let's talk about me, shall we?

i got onto the internet through geocities—crazy sentence to say now after all these years. of course, i played neopets and flash games like many other kids, but that was mostly through knowing those websites and urls existed, and preserving them in my mind so i could return to them for some mindless minutes of entertainment later. geocities was my first introduction to the creative, user-designed web, so to speak. instead of being a number to interact with a thing that someone else has made—a flash game, a youtube video, a website where you can collect fictional pets—the idea of geocities to me at the time was this idea of participating on the internet. being a part of it. writing whatever i wanted and posting it. sharing the link with others. having others find it and read it too—a part of me, my method of creative self-expression, whatever i desired to write and post on the less than permanent internet.

my best friend at the time was the one who needled me into creating accounts—first an email address, then an AIM, then a myspace, then an IMVU, so on and so forth. i wasn't going out looking for these, and though i'd heard of them before or seen ads of some of these sites, i wasn't interested in actually being on these platforms and making these accounts until my friend told me that i should. call me a people pleaser or easily influenced or whatever; i was 12. but it was through this link sharing, this naivety and ignorance of the vastness of the internet, that allowed me to be fascinated with the world wide web in the first place.

i usually cite quizilla as my first "fandom" website, because it was—but it wasn't because i found it by accident. it wasn't that i googled it or looked for a personality test and stumbled upon it. no, it's because i was chatting with a friend on AIM, and she had found some crazy chain letter story and shared it to me for how absurd it was, and sent me the link. it was on quizilla.

literally the moment i clicked that link changed my life forever. even though i read the crazy story, i also clicked on the username of the person who posted it, out of curiosity. that person had jonas brothers fanfics on their quizilla profile, of all things, which led me into an obsession with the jonas brothers in the 2 years that followed. through that link—that account—that platform—i got a lot more interested in writing, webdesign, and what it meant to be on the internet, not just as a numbered participant, but also as someone with an imagination, who finds fulfillment in creative expression. i wrote the longest thing i'd ever written in that time (30k of a self-insert, but we won't go into that), began to experiment with css and website design, and participated, sharing stuff that i thought was interesting or fun, worth 5 minutes of anyone's time.

the internet wasn't just about being a place where my presence didn't matter anymore—it became a medium of self-expression. more than that, it became a place where i could meet and socialize with people, especially as i developed avpd in my high school years.

the internet wasn't always like this. right now, when we talk about the internet, we don't talk about the random websites we find, the links we stumble upon. (i have an entire website dedicated to those for me, though.) the games we spend hours playing, by ourselves, without interacting with others. random personality tests, or just simply the news. we talk about google, but in the same way we talk about facebook, or even twitter. it's a verb; it's omnipresent; it exists within the context of our internet culture, but becomes meaningless outside of it. it's not to say it doesn't have meaning—but that the language we use represents our relationship with it, this assumed normalcy. this assumed dependence.

i bring up my own history because as young as i feel compared to many of my older internet friends, and how late to the game i always felt—i was there. i was there on the internet before twitter (since 2009), tumblr (since 2010), facebook (i lied about my age), bluesky now, and whatever will come in the future. i was there when people were saying that the internet was still being written; when websites were made with tables (eugh); when email was the primary way to connect with others, because irc was for nerds and nothing else had been invented yet.

i'm a big advocate for not looking at the past with rose colored glasses and getting caught up in nostalgia and greener grass. i believe that technology is not inherently harmful or bad—it creates more options for accessibility, especially for those who are disabled. and even outside of that, it allows us to learn about more people, communicate with others with a few keystrokes, and form relationships that we otherwise would never get to have. i don't want this to seem like i'm saying "man remember how good the internet used to be?" because i'm not—i believe that as things change, there are benefits as much as there are hindrances.

of course, it bears saying that the primary hindrance—of current twitter, of many platforms over the years, and the internet with increasing recency—is corporations. big money interests. capitalism.

it's why we get so tired of ads—it's why ads exist in the first place. it's why these social media platforms that used to feel like they were made by the same people who would use them (livejournal, youtube, twitter) have suddenly become these soulless impersonal websites. it becomes more obvious that they want you to use them more because they sell you on exclusivity and visual minimalism, rather than because that's where your friends are, and you have this unique way to express yourself.

in fact, i'll say this: the first time i learned about facebook when i was too young to use it, i was not impressed. i had a myspace at the time that i had dolled up to make pretty with sparkly gifs and obnoxious colors and weird fonts. when i saw how boring and samey everyone's facebook profile page was, i was like, what's the point? sure i could talk to my classmates and random other people in my life that i didn't really care about, but what about making myself different from others? what about my creative expression? what about having an account that makes me look unique, instead of blending in with everyone else?

and so here i am nearly two decades later pondering about the use of social media, our individuality as well as our collective interests, and how the internet has changed so much, both in itself and how it affects us, in that time.

i'm here because i want to talk to my friends and meet new people with common interests and get excited about them. i don't want to feel left out, but that's a normal experience—outside of fomo, it is in our core to connect with others. it's the whole meaning of everything. it's why i even made an email in the first place, in my basement with my best friend, secretly setting up a yahoo account because she wanted another way to talk to me, and i wanted another way to talk to her. it's why people have been leaving twitter little by little for another site—the same site as many others, because that's where all their friends are. whether it's bsky or mastodon or misskey or just back here on tumblr, we're here not just because of our desire for community, but even as simple as our desire for a bond, a relationship with another human being. to me, that is how "social media" is defined—a medium through which we socialize because of this innate desire.

and yet, of course the enshittification and corporatification makes this more difficult for us, in ways more than one. because the fact is that as we (as people) became better at using the internet, finished writing it, and understood it—psychologically and sociologically—so did the corporations. or advertisers, you take your pick. we, the everypeople who use the internet as means to fulfill our social and other self-indulgent desires, are not the only people here. as with many things else in the world, the internet turned from an unpredictable but fun mess of us figuring shit out as we went along, into a product designed to keep us using it and engaging with it more, so some rich people can put even more money into their pockets. it's why twitter is the way it is now; even why tumblr is the way it is. why social media has become about "content creation" and "small businesses." why it feels like, every day, we see more ads and AI generated bullshit, as a little bit of the original soul of the internet gets sucked away day by day.

but even there, i don't want to come across as cynical or world-weary. though i believe this to be true, i don't think it says anything about our lack of agency, or our lack of innate humanity. instead, i believe that this means, at least on the individual level, that we should think more about not only what we're doing on the internet, but why we're doing it. how we're doing it. are we here because we're addicted? or is there something we're getting out of it? sure, many websites now have more addictive UI and algorithms that tell the receptors of our brain to return to them because we were getting so much dopamine from them earlier. but i also wouldn't necessarily argue that the only solution to this is to, then, go offline.

i have many friends who've elected to depart social media but stay online—friends who i met through website building, to be fair, but that's one of my main points. i already wrote a manifesto on my love letter to the personal website; but the tl;dr is this:

the internet is not evil, it is not good, it is just a form. if we desire to express ourselves and socialize with others in this space, it does not have to be just about social media, and creating a new account on a new website every time people move. instead, we have personhood—we have individuality, we have agency. we have the ability to build our own websites, no matter how shitty or times new roman comic sansy or color clashy or sometimes inaccessible they can be. regardless of all these seeming impractical setbacks though, it does not absolve us of that ability to do whatever we want on the internet. and it also bears saying that websites, both the personal and impersonal, can change over time, for better or worse.

i am a huge proponent for people making their own personal websites. it makes me so so happy that neocities is gaining popularity, mostly because i love seeing people try their own hand at making a website for themselves, a new form of self-expression. i won't go into too much detail on this because i've already said everything i want to say about it (see above), but if you take away anything from this post, let it be this: consider making a personal website, a corner of the internet, for yourself, by yourself. not just because you want people to engage with it, or because you want to curate to an algorithm or an artistic/fannish trend. not because you want the things you make to gain traction, to get bigger numbers without considering the people behind those numbers, as soon as possible.

do it because you want to. because you have to. because you think it's cool, and because it's you. people may find it and judge it; but they may like it as well. the more unique and authentic and weird we are with each other, the more we are able to appreciate each other for who we really are. the internet is one of many places we can do this.

i don't really see these forms of self-expression separate from social media, but i do see social media separate from it. to me, social media is a vehicle to strengthen those connections, those relationships, much like DMs and IRCs; but it is not the be-all, end all of the internet. it's only a small part of it. not everything is permanent on the internet; but everything that ever has been online is a microcosm of the human experience, whether it's an old cloudflare site or twitter dot com in 2010.

our experiences on the internet are not about corporate interests. it's about using limewire to download pirate music, sharing random links we find, building a design that may not be practical or universally appealing but still represents a form of individuality. when i think of how the internet has grown, i don't think about what it means for companies or advertisers or what meetings must go on to get people like me to keep using it—i think about remembering the difference between addicting games dot com and addicted games dot com, clicking links on websites to find even more websites, sitting at the family computer and deciding if i wanted to spend hours on neopets or that one willy wonka flash game i grinded like several hours on one night when i was 7. i think about what it's always meant to me, because the internet was not always a centralized place where i was going on the same website every day. the rise of internet centralization to the point that it's become expected, the norm, the primary way any of us to be online, is not inherently a bad thing—but i wouldn't say it's a universal good, either, when the internet is a wide and vast space, and can be so much more than that.

because the one thing that remains throughout the years is our agency and choice. we still have the ability to make the internet what we want it to be, or at least a corner of it, something separate from the corporations, the enshittification, economically researched user interfaces and experiences, the advertisements, the "like and share so the algorithm boosts me more." there's still a point to it all without the money, and without twitter. and it's both our desire for creativity and self-expression, as well as our intrinsic bonds with each other. despite it all, it's about our humanity.

as the internet continues to grow, so do we. nevertheless, the importance of our humanity, and retaining it, will remain. oftentimes it is up to us to remind ourselves of that.

-

links here, for access:

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Says She Won’t ‘Enshittify the Network With Ads’

R U AN ARTIST ON SOCIAL MEDIA??? by omoulo

links @ kingdra.net (my links, like bookmarks)

A manifesto of sorts; or, my love letter to the personal website by me

[flowersandbirdsflyingfree]

Callout Post: Be Wary of the Following User

I've tried everything before. I've remained quiet, I've tried going my separate ways as peacefully as possible, I've made mistakes in impulsive arguements, and I even tried quietly moving accounts. But I'm tired of remaining quiet. There's someone who's been stalking me since the friendship break-up back in August of 2022. Originally fluffy935, now known as edwards-kronorium115, has been harrassing me in subtle ways non-stop.

We had been great friends at first in 2021, only for things to fall apart when we were making too many mistakes to upset each other within a short timespan. I made a few mistakes in accidentally reposting their screenshots due to them not having a watermark and not being able to tell which was “gifted to me” or which was completely theirs as there was no indication to tell the difference. They hadn’t added watermarks until just recently when I had checked on them.

At first, we had disagreements due to sharing the same f/o. I already do with a very close friend of mine. Unlike that close friend, Eddie would go back and forth from being supportive to lashing out at me. My old first blog here (staminuptosuccess) is deleted but there I was spammed in DMs over a friend supporting me with Edward at the time. I was called a homewrecker, spammed vomit emojis, and further insulted. It was getting so bad that I went to Twitter and left everything behind around 2022. We made up and became friends again. Only for it to get worse. It got so bad she looked me up on FACEBOOK AND SOMEHOW FOUND MY PRIVATE NAME. I cannot show the contact to avoid doxxing. But her full name is there. I was isolated. She constantly told me how “I am your only true friend.” I was manipulated often into being away from my friends. She constantly tried putting everyone down, me included. I would be built up only to be put down again. I couldn’t handle her taking out her emotions on me. No matter how hard I tried, I always did something to make her angry or sad. So, I left Twitter in the midst of her rage. I uncensored the names of friends who consent to me posting the thread.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want to upset her anymore and frankly? I didn’t want to be abused anymore either. Every time I was starting to thrive, she’d explode. She would pepper me in drawing gifts only to slam me down that I didn’t care enough or that I ruined everything for her. So I ended it. The Facebook thing freaked me out especially bc how did she find my name?

We had a short talk of what seemed like closure and wishing each other the best in life… until it wasn’t.

She took my quiz and made her presence known twice. I’d have my post liked until I was blocked. It happened to my friend too. After a while, I was able to find a way to block her back so she’d stop the discreet spying. She would reblog the same things I did. And ever so slowly plagiarize my work.

My Kalimba video: December 31st, 2022

(To be continued. Check below)

Part 2

Part 3

[kenjakusbrainstem]

Date Night (Mahito x Kenjaku)

Hey! My friend is hosting a Mahito Month on twitter (I'm kenjakusbrain over there!) and I've decided to participate as I do love the character. This is the first of many to come this month, the first week is sfw content, but next week we will get back to the nsfw I generally write! Hopefully you enjoy this as I did! And special thank you to the person/events that inspired this <3

Mahito was very comfortable, so much so that if he had been able to fall asleep, he was sure he would be. Laying in the sand inside the domain they used as a base of operations wasn’t something he did often, but today was an exception. He had originally planned on meeting Geto because the strange curse user had needed to explain something to him in regards to obtaining one of Sukuna’s fingers. 

It seemed Geto was late though, as Mahito thought he was supposed to be here around noon. Mahito wasn’t very punctual himself, but Geto making him wait did make him irritated. Which is how he ended up lounging in the sand, trying to soak up some of the comfortable, yet artificial sun. At least he got to relax before he complained to Geto. 

The beach was unusually relaxing today, as Jogo was out somewhere. Mahito wasn’t quite sure what he did when he went out, he just knew that it was easier to relax when he wasn’t around to yell. 

It was due to said silence on the beach that Mahito was able to hear the door to the domain being opened from the waters edge. He sat up immediately, sand uncomfortably sticking to his bare back as he moved. Unsurprisingly, the person he had been waiting on walked through the door and onto the beach. Today Geto had forgone the robes he so often wore in favor of his casual black slacks and dark coat. 

“Geto! You’re late today! I’ve been waiting here all day, there's so much more I could have done,” Mahito whined as he stood. He wasn’t mad at Geto, but he did feel like laying around on the beach was a waste of time since he hadn’t brought a book with him.

Geto looked around, observing the scene and taking in the sight before him. Mahito often lounged on the beach, but he didn’t always do so in the nude. At least not since Geto had given the curse clothes to wear. He did appreciate the sight before him, Mahito’s stitched skin glistening under the sunlight, damp as if he had jumped in the water before laying down. But he supposed it wasn’t the worst thing that he could have walked in on. He walked over to the lounge chairs, where Mahito’s clothes were scattered atop the closest chair. Mahito had been smart enough not to sit them in the sand this time.

“Plans have changed and I was held up longer than anticipated. Come with me Mahito, we can talk over dinner. I haven’t eaten all day,” Geto said, picking up Mahito’s clothes with care and bringing them over to the curse. 

Mahito pouted at him. Geto was always so busy but never explained what he was doing. Mahito was curious, he was sure there was something that he could do to make their plans go by faster. It just seemed he wanted to keep secrets. It’s fine though, Mahito would keep some secrets to himself, like the new hideout he had just found for himself in the sewer. Geto didn’t need to know about that.

“Dinner? What’s in it for me? I had to wait allllll day here only for you to take me somewhere else,” Mahito’s complaint’s were hollow. He was more than interested in accompanying Geto out, but he didn’t want the curse user to think that he would just go along with whatever he wanted. Especially after neglecting him all day. 

Geto held out his hand, beckoning Mahito closer to him. Like a stubborn cat Mahito crossed his arms and stood his ground, refusing to move. 

A sigh escaped Geto’s lips as he resigned himself to close the distance between them. He slung Mahito’s clothes over his shoulder and pushed up his sleeves. If Mahito was going to act like a child, Geto was fully prepared to treat him like one. Geto placed his hands on Mahito’s hips, and moved the curse, spinning him around so his back was facing Geto. 

Mahito laughed, not expecting the movement and not trying to protest it, he was more curious at what Geto was doing. He held still as the man behind him ran his hands all along his backside, wiping off all the sand from his skin. The effort was appreciated as the sand was beginning to itch his skin. It also helped that Geto’s large hands were firm but gentle against him, the touch too light to be a massage but still relaxing in some way.

The hands drifted lower, brushing the sand off of his ass and legs. Mahito squirmed, it wasn’t the first time Geto had touched him, but he wasn’t used to having the man’s hands all over his body.

“Put these on and then we will go, it isn’t too far of a walk. I’ll make it worth your wait,” Geto said. He was very to the point today, despite being late. Draping the clothes over Mahito’s shoulders he stepped away from the curse and walked back to the door to wait for him.

--

The walk was silent, Geto rarely spoke to him as they walked through the city so this was no surprise to Mahito. The curse didn’t mind though, it was nearing dusk so he was enjoying the view of the city and the humans around them. There weren’t as many people out as he had expected, certainly fewer than he normally saw during the day. He supposed it was because they had found themselves off of the main streets and walking down a few side roads. 

Before long they stopped in front of a small cafe, Geto turned to face him, smiling warmly before waving his hand toward the building. 

“I’ll get us a seat outside, are there any kinds of food you like, Mahito?” Geto asked, he figured the easiest way to make up the day to Mahito was by giving him a new experience. Food would have to do for now, but there was always time for something more in depth later.

Mahito thought to himself for a moment before answering. He couldn’t remember if he had tried any human foods, eating seemed like a waste of time to him.

“Curse’s don’t need to eat, it’s just another reason why they’re superior to humans,” Mahito said smugly, cocking his head as he spoke. He wasn’t opposed to eating, but he did find it trivial. Just another thing that he took pride in as a curse, the fact that his body didn’t need to consume like that just to exist.

Geto didn’t mind Mahito’s behavior, he always found the curse quite endearing even when he was being difficult. Regardless of Mahito’s thoughts on food, he was going to make the curse try some. Since he was so childish, Geto wondered if his palette would be childish as well, perhaps something sweet was the way to go.

Mahito followed behind Geto as he walked into the cafe. Geto immediately began talking to the hostess, but Mahito paid them no mind, he was too busy looking through all of the displays. They had more confections than Mahito knew existed, he’s only known about a few from the books and movies he’d consumed. The sight didn’t make him hungry, but he did think that they looked cute. Which, in his mind, was not the quality to look for in food. 

While Mahito was distracted, Geto followed the hostess and was seated outside. He had made the choice to order several kinds of crepes, definitely more than one person needed. She had asked if he was waiting on someone as he ordered, to which he simply ignored the question and finished placing his order.

After a little time wandering around inside the store, Mahito eventually wandered over to the table Geto had been seated at. Mahito pulled out both chairs opposite the curse user, sitting in one and putting his legs up in the other one. “Now let’s get into it, I located one of Sukuna’s fingers and would like you to retrieve it for me,” Geto spoke as the curse settled. He wanted to get into business before the food arrived.

--

It took about twenty minutes for the food to show up. The conversation had shifted from planning to Mahito talking about a book he had read the previous day. Geto listened intently as the curse described a particularly gruesome scene about a troop of boys that had stumbled across an insatiable evil. They were so engrossed in conversation, that a plate being sat between the two of them broke the spell of their focus.

“My! It isn’t often one person orders this much! Hopefully you’re hiding another stomach somewhere to keep all this food! Or are you still waiting on someone? I can take it back and keep it warm til they arrive,” The waitress spoke cheerfully as she sat down several plates. Each plate had a different kind of crepe on it, one savory and three others adorned with different fruits, chocolate, and powdered sugar. 

Mahito paused as he reached out to touch some of the food she had sat down, it looked just like the stuff in the cases and he was more than curious. It was obvious she couldn’t see him and was just addressing Geto, who hadn’t acknowledged her yet as his eyes were still locked on Mahito.

“No you can leave it. I am on some kind of date I suppose, just not the conventional one. Thank you but you can just drop the check and make yourself scarce,” Geto looked over at the waitress as he spoke. It didn’t take much effort for his dismissal to sound like a curse had she decided to linger. 

Mahito wasn’t paying much attention to the waitress; however, he had caught one of the words Geto had said. “Date? You’re taking me on a date?” the curse asked, the concept not entirely foreign to him as he had read about it. As he mulled it over in his mind he supposed this wasn’t too far from a date. Dinner with someone you are affectionate toward. The word love echoed in his head, it was all rubbish to him, foolish human emotions. Yet for some reason he didn’t quite mind the concept of a date night with Geto.

Geto ignored the question for a moment, choosing instead to rearrange the food that had been sat between them. He places the savory dish in front of himself, moving a crepe with chocolate and bananas in front of Mahito.

When Mahito didn’t begin eating, Geto reached over, cutting up a forkful of the confection and raising it to the curse’s lips. He cocked his head, holding the fork there until Mahito opened his mouth. 

The food was sweet, a rush that instantly made his mouth water. Mahito couldn’t quite help a small moan that escaped his throat as he swallowed the bite offered to him. He felt, in that moment, that he could understand why humanity didn’t get upset at having to eat so often. If food tasted so good, why hadn’t he tried it yet?

“Maybe I did want to take you on a date, it isn’t like we need the labels of humanity. If we were though, I would definitely say that I’ve been courting you in some way, so yes, a date will suffice,” Geto explained, handing Mahito the fork he had used to feed him with.

Reaching down, he grabbed another fork and began to eat his own food. “All of these are for you to try, hopefully your appetite for sweets is as insatiable as your curiosity.”

[corndogninja]

Is the Punisher in Spider-Man 2? An Investigation

A persistent yet specious factoid that the Punisher (portayed by Thomas Jane, or his stunt double, from the 2004 movie) can be seen in the finale of Spider-Man 2 has circled around the internet for decades. But is this really the case? Spoilers – probably not!

If you want a quick visual overview, check the video -- a longer text writeup is under the fold!

Foreword: The claims

The claims center around a man seen in the movie's finale: clad in a black jacket, he turns to look at Mary Jane as she runs through the park before turning back and continuing to walk away:

The man has no lines and is never clearly in focus during the shot, which centers on Dunst running in slo-mo.

The basic claim - that the Punisher appears here - does have several reasons it would be appealing or believable:

The Punisher first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #129, so a cameo in a Spider-movie would bring things "full circle"

The movie already features several cameos, including Stan Lee and Bruce Campbell

Pre-MCU crossovers are especially intriguing to a Marvel universe fan

A Wolverine cameo was considered for the first Spider-Man movie, setting a precedent for such crossovers

However, I quickly grew suspicious of this claim for several reasons:

Nobody can agree on the details: did Sony or Raimi want the cameo? Was it him or just a stunt double?

The only source offered is "the DVD commentary". There is never a specific quote given, and if it was plainly stated on the commentary surely the specific details would be easy to verify. This also makes for good cloud-cover, it sounds believable enough and who's going to dig out their old DVD and listen to two hours of chitchat to verify it?

The only places making this claim are clickbait listicle content-farms or user-generated pages like Twitter or Reddit. Neither of these are known for perfect sourcing!

This particular cameo doesn't make much sense to me. The Punisher of the comics is a vigilante gunman, why would a cameo feature him casually strolling through a park? 2004's The Punisher was set in Florida, if this is meant to be the same character why'd he move up the eastern seaboard?

Part 1: The Commentaries

Every time a source is offered to back up the cameo, there is simply a generic referral to "the DVD commentary". However, there are in fact three DVD commentaries for this movie!

I'll save you the suspense: I listened to all three and none of them mention any such thing. Here's the clips of the relevant scene in all three commentaries:

I have listened to all three commentaries in full, not just this scene. Relevant observations from all three:

Commentary 1: Director Sam Raimi and actor Tobey Maguire, and producers Avi Arad and Grant Curtis (Raimi and Maguire recorded together, as did Arad and Curtis - but the four are not together and the commentary combines elements of both discussions)

During the scene, Maguire speaks of how the ending of the movie reminds him of The Graduate. Raimi is mostly silently listening to Maguire. Neither mention the man in the park.

This is the only commentary to feature Sam Raimi - since most sources point to "Raimi on the DVD commentary", this is enough to disqualify them.

Avi Arad produced both Spider-Man 2 and The Punisher, even casting Jane himself, but makes no reference to the Punisher in his commentary.

Curtis points out that the priest at the wedding is played by producer Joe Caracciolo - if you're calling out one cameo, why not point out another one that happens less than a minute later? Several other cameos (noticeably Campbell) are also pointed out.

Stunt doubles are briefly discussed (for instance, mentioned that Rosemary Harris - Aunt May - wanted to do some of her own stunts) but never in the context of Thomas Jane's double.

The commentary mentions that Raimi considered cutting or even not filming the park scene altogether, making it unlikely that a special cross-production cameo would be set up in such a scene.

Commentary 2: Special effects supervisor John Dykstra and effects team (Steve Johnson, Eric Hayden, Anthony LaMolinara, Scott Stokdyk, Lydia Bottegoni)

This commentary is almost more like a special-effects podcast. Ock's arms don't appear until over a half-hour into the movie, but for that first half-hour the team is already going into deep detail on the production and design of the physical and digital arms. This means that - outside of action scenes - the commentary frequently is not directly discussing what is happening onscreen. Predictably, only general remarks about the approach to VFX design are given during the park scene and the black-clad man is not noted.

Commentary 3: Producer Laura Ziskin and screenwriter Alvin Sargent. This commentary is exclusive to the "2.1" extended cut

During the scene, Ziskin remarks on how Sargent wrote the scene of MJ running through the park but there was some debate on whether or not to include it. Neither mention anything about the man MJ runs past.

Many cameos of family and friends of crew, mainly featured extras in street scenes, are mentioned; Caracciolo as the priest is called out again as well. Nobody in the park is pointed out.

Several other Spider-Man characters not seen in the movie are remarked upon, including Felicia Hardy (Black Cat) being in several early drafts and Dr. Connors potentially becoming the Lizard in a sequel. But the Punisher is never mentioned.

So I can conclusively say that a cameo from the Punisher is not mentioned in any commentary for Spider-Man 2. I also searched to see if Raimi or Arad had ever mentioned such a thing in later articles or interviews, but found nothing. This is enough to call the story "untrue", for me. Nobody related to the production of Spider-Man 2 confirming or even alluding to this cameo doesn't give it a leg to stand on.

Still, in the interest of being thorough...

Part 2: Is it even plausible?

Let's give the story the benefit of the doubt. Could it even be possible?

2.1: Scheduling

Spider-Man 2 filmed in New York from April 12 through May 13 2003. In the shot in question, Mary Jane is running through City Hall Park so that scene must have been shot during this time.

Thomas Jane was officially cast as the Punisher on April 3, 2003 (though he had reportedly been sought for the role for a while beforehand). Production began in July and filming (in Tampa, FL) wrapped in October.

So there is a little overlap where the Spider-Man 2 crew would've known that Jane would be playing Frank Castle. Whether they could get him away from pre-production (Jane reportedly spent 6 months training with Navy SEALs for the role) or if the low-budgeted, tightly-scheduled production of The Punisher would be willing to loan out their headlining star to a rival production for a blurry, silent, semi-cameo is a little less plausible.

Actual filming did not overlap – and even if it did, Tampa and NYC are over 1,000 miles apart – so it is impossible for Jane (or his double) to have popped over to the other set on a slow day.

2.2: The Stunt Double

The majority of places that claim the Punisher is in Spider-Man offer that it's just the stunt double, not Jane himself. Thomas Jane reportedly performed the majority of his own stunts (75% to 90%, depending who you ask) and the movie's credits do not list a double or stand-in for him.

According to IMDB, Tom McComas was Thomas Jane's uncredited stunt double on The Punisher (he also included The Punisher among his credits in a 2016 reel). Though he has appeared in other Marvel productions (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Runaways, WandaVision) he is not credited as appearing in Spider-Man 2.

If you want to familiarize yourself with how he looks to judge for yourself, McComas can be seen as a prison guard in the opening of Men in Black 3 (the slim man who tells Boris "You've got a visitor) or in the short film The Stunt Double.

To my eyes, McComas is pretty obviously not the man in the scene. Even accounting for the blurriness of the movie shot and age differences (I had trouble finding contemporaneous images of McComas, many are at least ten years after Spider-Man 2), things like his jawline, the overall shape of his head, and his facial features are noticeably different.

2.3 Thomas Jane

But could it be Jane himself? We get awfully close to a "smoking gun" here with a note in the letters page of Wizard magazine:

I have a question about "Spider-Man 2." I never noticed this in the theater, but does the Punisher (actor Tom Jane) make a cameo in the movie? I was watching the DVD and when Mary Jane is running through the park in her wedding gown, she passes a man in black who turns around to look at her, and I swear it is Tom Jane. This is the only person in the scene who takes special notice of her. If I am correct I hope my Marvel No-Prize is a good one because I have never won anything before.

(As an aside: despite the fan's assertion, the man in black is not "the only person in the scene who takes special notice of her". Although he is a little more in the foreground than other extras, several others can be seen staring at MJ or even stopping to do a double-take as she runs by.)

Wizard responded with:

"And you ain't gonna win anything now, either," says Jane of the Spidey cameo. "I can neither confirm nor deny that the skinny little, queeny-lookin'-er, wait, that is me in 'Spider-Man 2.' Natch." So Bryan, it looks like your keen eye has gained you the respect of Tom Jane and junior detectives everywhere. Still, we checked out the DVD ourselves, and sure enough—that guy in the right-hand corner looks an awful lot like the same guy who flung a pot of hot beans in Kevin Nash's face in "The Punisher." But, even though Jane admits to the cameo, some folks on our staff still aren't convinced! Check out this screen shot and you tell me.

I've only seen the clip circulated online, so I'm not sure of the source (and I'm not going to buy a bunch of old issues of Wizard on ebay to verify) -

The twitter user who provided the image said it was from the "Mega Movie Issue" from spring 2005

A 2006 forum post states it was from an April Fool's issue

A 2007 forum thread says it was mentioned in "the latest Wizard", though nobody in the forum is convinced that it's Jane.

Although Jane's response would be proof-positive for many, his flippant, noncommittal tone that doesn't even convince the editor makes me doubt that he's being serious. Couple this with suspicions that it may have been an April Fool's joke and the fact that Jane has (as far as I am aware) never mentioned this in any other interview, and the total lack of evidence from anyone involved in Spider-Man 2, it becomes even less believable.

But to be fair, in the spirit of Wizard's "you tell me", here is another comparison. These photos of Jane are all from The Punisher, which as you will recall means they were taken within months (if not weeks) of the Spider-Man 2 scene.

Although the resemblance is closer to Jane than McComas, I don't think this is him either. The park guy has a squarer head, wider jaw, different nose, and different profile. He seems to be wearing a gray collared shirt rather than a black tee, and doesn't look to have the "trained with Navy SEALs for months" build that Jane displays as Frank Castle.

3. Postscript

My theory as to why this caught on is what's known in editing as "eye trace". The shot just before has MJ running from the left to the right of the screen, so viewers are already looking to the right of the frame. Then a man pops in from the right of the frame, looking at MJ but also towards the camera - so people are more likely to notice this one guy. You can see the effect of this accidental emphasis in the letter to Wizard - he claims that "this [man] is the only person in the scene who takes special notice of her" even though it's quite apparent that several other extras are staring at MJ (one even stopping mid-stride to turn around and gawk).

Since the movie was first available on VHS and DVD, the lower picture quality of an already blurry scene also added to the plausibility of this being Jane; on Blu-Ray and 4K the differences become more apparent.

So I say: Myth Busted. or at the very least: Implausible

[lone-rhapsodist]

Some major updates...

I am going to try to sum up the things that have happened in the past few weeks. I am trying to get back on track and move on and I need to get a few things off my chest before I can do that properly.

This post contains major updates about my Classics project, my Discord server, and a few new and upcoming projects. This is definitely a very long post, so I will put a 'Keep reading' below to make it easier on your dashboard. If you do want to read it, please make sure you have a tea or a coffee on the ready. As always, thank you for your patience and support!

First, the 'no' news. I received no reply from Working Classicists. I know I should insist. I know I should probably send a second email before giving up. But the reality is, no one is interested in my project to create an online community for Classics. Not in the way that I intend it, at least. So, I am quitting. Or to put it more positively, I am shelving this particular project for the time being, if not for good. I know I could try reaching out to Asterion and other organisations, but to be honest, I am not convinced. I am not convinced that anyone is really interested in the idea, or willing to work with me to make it happen, or both. The only person who understood what I was talking about and wanted to support me was that ex lecturer of mine from university. She is the best, bless her. But anyone else, whether academic folks or not, has been largely unresponsive. Christ, even the people I started working on this project with abandoned me just after a few months. I have been working on this on and off for years now. What is the point of keeping on banging my head against this wall? I no longer have the drive to keep going. Therefore, I shall stop.

Second, the 'bad' news. I deleted my Discord server, SymForum. I had been thinking about doing it for a while. I was keeping it as an experimental platform, in the hope that things with other organisations would pick up and I would be able to move on from it soonish. In the meantime, it made sense to keep the server as a testing ground for ideas, to see what worked, what didn't, what to keep and what to throw away. Turns out, what to throw away was the whole thing. Because the server was basically dead. And so there was no point keeping it if it was just going to stay dead. I would like to point out, there is no problem whatsoever with that. If anyone on here was on it and they were just lurking, that is absolutely fine. I am lurker number 1 here. I lurk on Facebook. I lurk on Twitter. I lurk on Reddit. I lurk pretty much anywhere but here, and by most Tumblr users' standards, I reckon my activity on here is pretty much lurking anyway. I lurk on Discord too, especially since I've got nothing to contribute to most conversations. When I have something to say, I'll say it, but that ends up being like one time in a million, and then that one time is fine, but it's one in a million, so, it is what it is. Anyway, as a major lurker myself, am I really going to blame people for lurking on my server? Hell no. But am I going to blame myself for it? Hell yes. Because I'm supposed to run the show here. And I hate doing that. I hate being in charge of things. It's the story of my life, and I just can't do that anymore. So I deleted the server. And in my opinion, good riddance. If it was supposed to be a playground for my project, it showed that people are not interested in bringing in their ideas and asking for advice on how to develop them further nearly as much as I thought they would be, and that's fair enough. But if it was supposed to be a Discord server in the traditional sense, then there's already plenty that fit the bill, and I'm happy to recommend them: Classics Central; Miletos; The Cambridge Latin Discord Server; Tychon's Symposium; and for those of you who like hoarding stuff, the Classicists' PDF Society. There are also several subreddits that are valid, such as r/latin, r/ancientgreek, r/classics. I hope you find these useful.

Now, the 'good' news, at least for me, I guess. While I was damning myself with these questions about how to create an online Classics community in any way, shape, or form, something remarkable happened. A local Classics community popped up on my Facebook feed and I was invited to attend an event. Literally 15 mins away from my house. The timing couldn't have been better. While I was in the depths of my struggle, I had at some point contemplated the idea of moving this project of a Classics community from online to physical. I am not going to give away where I am based, but I live in a pretty big place, and it always struck me as odd that, amongst all these very official Classics academic societies, nothing existed that was more open to the general public. I did look into how I could get something like this started, but options seemed limited to using Facebook and word of mouth, and even then, I wasn't quite sure what the actual thing should look like. Online, I always wanted something like a forum, but in real life, what would it be? A monthly meet up? A book club? No idea. So, when this society came up on Facebook and I went to their first event, I was very impressed. The aim of the society is to promote Classics among everyone, through informal meet ups in which we read something in translation and then have a discussion alongside it. It's very chilled, very simple, and to be honest, very enjoyable. Our first meet ups have been about a few Platonic dialogues, and again, I was so happy with them -- we just sat down with tea and biscuits, took turns reading the dialogue, and from time to time had a pause to discuss what we just read and share our thoughts on it. From conversations I've had with the person who started this, it is clear to me that this is intended for anyone with an interest in Classics, with no need for prior learning, which I really appreciate. So, to me, it seems like a no brainer that I should invest more time into the society, and that I should help them develop further. I am currently applying to become part of their committee, and hopefully I will be able to join them soon. But even if for some reason I was unable to, this is a very valid project, and it makes sense that I should try to contribute to it, since it is very local to where I live, and it's perfectly in line with my job, and indeed, if there is any way in which anything even remotely close to my own original project could ever develop, it is through things like this -- grassroots approaches to Classics communities, similar to Working Classicists, grounded in reality, with real people, through real conversations. That's not to say that what happens online isn't real! But it is something I'm noticing, at least for myself, with all this 'online living' that I do, that because of it, sometimes I tend to lose touch with reality, and in turn, I end up not doing things in the real world that I would like to do, as if doing things online could be a replacement for that. Online can complement reality -- indeed, it is an extension of it. But online is online, and reality is reality. It's not easy to articulate, and I still struggle with the concept myself at times, but I do see a nuance, a difference, a distinction etc. I think that me moving the project from online to physical is a positive thing, and I look forward to exploring it further, and this not just for this particular project, but for other ones too.

Of course, technically speaking, the society does not (yet) fully replace the project, and in that sense, there are still some things which I would like to experiment with online, if at all possible, some more in an active way, some more in a passive one. An example of passive project is what I would like to refer to as 'Classics Helpdesk'. You know what a helpdesk is. It's a form of IT or other support desk that you go to or contact to ask questions about a problem that you need help with. That's what I want to do, but for Classics. Basically, the idea is to create a helpdesk where everyone who has any questions about anything Classics related (a text, a topic, a bit of Latin, university, work, you name it) can ask it, and I will respond, and I will try my best to help them with it, and hopefully it will actually help. It's essentially the idea that was at the heart of the project -- to help others develop their ideas about the ancient world -- but stripped to its core and reduced to something like "I'm a Classics person, ask me anything" as a service for anyone to use. I like it, because it requires no real work -- it will probably be just a pinned post at the top of my main blog, inviting people to send me any asks, even anonymously, or just message me, and I will respond, either publicly if it's an ask, or privately if it's a message. The details can be refined as I go, but basically that's the gist of it. Again, it would be good for me because it would require essentially no work, and I could just sit here and mind my own business, and then, whenever someone sends me a request for help, I can info-dump them with whatever they need, and hopefully make them happy, and definitely also make ME happy in the process, because let's face it, this is as much about making me happy as it is about making you happy -- with making you happy being more important by a pretty good margin, but still, it's a win-win. And don't get me wrong, this is not intended to rival or replace the already great number of brilliant people on here who also offer this kind of service. If anything, I would simply like to join their number in a more official fashion, by putting myself out there through my own helpdesk service, and hope that I can actually be of service to anyone. In the past, I've had a couple of people send me asks with questions about Latin stuff or Greek mythology, and it was so fun to sit down and respond to them, and I hope that I may be able to share again that kind of happiness with others in the future. So yeah. Classics Helpdesk. Please watch this space.

As for the more active side of the project, the one specifically about helping people develop their ideas about the ancient world… I think it's about time I faced the fact that the one person who really needed help developing their ideas… is me. So, one of my personal goals with this thing for the upcoming academic year -- yes, I still measure my year goals using the school calendar… I'm a teacher, don't judge me -- is that I should actually start, well, writing. And not give a fuck about it. Like, what it looks like, whether it's good or bad etc. This is an incredibly painful thing for me, and so far I have found it really hard to make the time to make it happen. But I just can't bear to keep not doing this any longer. So, here we are. The great idea to help me make this easier for myself is to do a bit like I'm doing for my Classics project and try to ground it more into reality. One thing I had considered was starting a podcast, because I noticed that when I talk about my ideas out loud with people in my life it's a lot easier to get the words out and make things make sense. However, lately I have been thinking that something that could work well for me instead is writing dialogues. This is something that goes back a long way for me personally, as dialogues were some of the very first original posts I ever wrote on Tumblr -- not on this blog, but on my old one, and in my native tongue. It was a great way to get thoughts out and do some self-critique without being too harsh or lenient on myself. As an informal way to explore my own ideas about the ancient world, I think it could work very well. Not to mention that dialogues are literally THE form of self- and collective reflection from the ancient world par excellence. So yeah, I cannot think of a better way to do this. I could still try other things. Letters are a possibility. Essays too. But first, I need to regain some confidence in my writing. I hope that this will help.

Lastly, I should perhaps mention that, at some point, you might end up seeing some of my own poetry on this blog too. This is mainly because Poetizer, where I first started posting my poetry, is now turning to a subscription-based model -- those bastards… So now I have to consider moving somewhere else. I always thought I would end up on Tumblr with my poetry too anyway, so I suppose this is just the sign that I need to make the move. I don't know when, I don't know how. I don't know whether to make another blog for it. I guess it would make sense. I already have neon-rhapsodies as an archive for my blogging, plus ideally that is where the dialogues would go as well. However, I do think that the poetry should be separate. I think I'll probably stick with the identity I had crafted for myself on Poetizer, but we'll see. In the meantime, it's exciting to think about all the possibilities that might materialise in the future.

Man, this was a long post. Thanks for sticking along for the ride. I am sorry if you were invested in my Classics project as it originally was, and wanted me to keep going with things as they were. I hope you can see why a change was needed, and that you will be happy to keep following any developments in this sense. I am grateful as ever for all your encouragement and support. Thank you, and take care.

[beeseverywhen]

I can not tell if some of these bots are bots. By combining random words they are perfectly emulating tumblr users. The only thing that I'm clinging on to is how averse the average tumblr is to having their face next to their posts. But some of these bots are starting to use pictures of ppl out doing things/ messing around and I'm like... this could be a person. Is this them or is it a meme. Their face isn't in it. It's not centred on their body. This could be a person. Especially as twitter continues to slowly sink like a very slowly burning very very large construction in the sea.

It's like one of those big abandoned rigs/sea stations where years after its been left some ppl come across it and move in like 'we can repurpose this' and next thing you know they are living there like 'we are a country now' and things seem to be thriving and they appear to have a functioning society and its like 'have these ppl escaped capitalism' and then one day there's some kind of disaster and loads of ppl abandon it and come back to regular society and they are all like telling stories about how it was.

And then as time goes on every now and again another person gives up and abandons ship, and comes back to land living society with a even crazier story about what's been going down since the last person left. And time goes on and eventually it's like largely abandoned. The ppl still living there are either very loyal or remain thanks to sunk cost. And its pretty well understood that by this point the guy in charge is a dictator and its all a bit culty and there's no real reason to stay. Its just living amongst like empty rusting offices (cause there aren't enough ppl left to keep it running like a society/improving so it's just like an abandoned weather station in the middle of the sea again and the weather's always shit cause its the middle of the sea. The dream is dead, they are just only realising one at a time.

And then one day someone's boat goes past and the place is on fire and everyone's like hey are you guys OK? And tries to evacuate them. But they are all like 'our leader says its fine. Its cool we don't need rescuing. Like you could rescue us. Life on land is shit. Enjoy capitalism losers!' And everyone's a bit like uncomfortable about leaving them there, but it's like. What can you do. They are just like 'the fire keeps to its side of the station we keep to ours, its np.'

But everyone decides to keep an eye on things all the same. Reporting on things out of morbid curiosity and a little bit like 'you can still get out. We're here.' And then one day the place (still on fire) starts to sink in to the sea and you really think they'll jump ship now. What's left? But they are still clinging on to this dream of what it could have been. And the place is like burning but also littered with advertisements cause the cult leader is letting just about anyone sponsor them, and it is a burning wreck sinking in to the sea, but also its on the news 24/7 so there are always ppl willing to stick their logo on it

Anyway, I've got completely carried away with my metaphor here. But twitters like that. And as ppl slowly abandon ship and are like 'I guess we'll return to the shitty lives we thought we'd escaped' they bring a bit of 'comune that's also a country on a rig in the middle of the sea' culture with them. And so there are now more ppl on tumblr doing twitter things like having attractively posed pictures as their icon

[lex-dalan]

Hello Tumblr!

It's @nameless-writer-for-stories here, remember me? Dang, it's been like 5 years since I went on hiatus. My life had been nuts and still is now.

I would like to apologize to those who followed me (through these users: @nameless-writer-for-stories @rwby-dust) for the radio silence and long overdue hiatus. I did not mean to leave you all in the dark without explanations.

My previous years of Tumblr wasn't that bad, the issue was me. To be honest, I literally had no clue what I was doing despite my imaginations and urge to show my creativeness. Let's just say growing up into a full adult is a literal rollercoaster for me so I wasn't really myself at that time. There were times I tend to feel doubt in my writing and art, and experienced inferiority complex--which was definitely not good so I had to leave the social media to clear my head.

I resumed to practicing my drawing skills before I entered college in 2019. Around that time, I was late to join Arknights, a tower-defense game that was released in early January. And boy, it was the best game for me. Because of its art and lore, I got inspired to come back for creating art. I was not confident if I can make a return in Tumblr so, I decided to try Twitter with a fresh start and didn't bother posting my Tumblr works because of my insecurities. My first experience there was awkward and barely gained any followers so I was doubting myself again.

However, I stopped doubting and started thinking, "the only reason you didn't have anything is because you're not pushing to try more." Later on, I tried posting new art contents like mini comics and some of my favourite Arknights characters. It was slow progress and I only had 76 followers. Honestly, it was okay for me since it means I needed to improve more--until I got roped into League of Legends because of Starguardians2022. Not gonna lie, I was attracted to that because of the potential angst material (I'm crazy lol), especially Akali. There's just something about her that I can relate in a deeper level and I fell in love with her prime lore and SG lore.

So, I started drawing Lol content and also tried playing the game. Several days later, I finally got 100 followers! I was really happy and decided to keep it up. I'm still drawing Arknights content whenever I feel like it, and I'm planning to make a fan Star Guardian story with a little twist.

Just when I started to make more posts, the Elon Musk incident happened. I won't explain the details because I know that everyone has seen the news. Everyone in Twitter began talking about moving into different social medias but honestly, it's hard to leave Twitter behind because everyone was comfortable in speaking their thoughts and sharing things that they couldn't be able to share in real life, and I feel that way too. I came back to Tumblr with a good reason--that is to keep going. Sure, it's sad that Twitter is doomed to close but if it weren't for that site, I would have not be able to meet people who shows confidence in showing their artworks, and fan literature. Whether they're silly drawings or shenanigans, they are truly dedicated and passionate in their works. They inspired me to keep trying and show the best of what I can do.

Until Twitter does shut itself down, I will bring everything from that site to here. So, yeah---

I'M ALIVE FELLAS!

[ss-tech-services]

Digital Marketing for the Real Estate Industry: Modern Approach to Buying and Selling

In this fast paced world of digital technology, traditional marketing approaches have ceased to be effective for real estate experts desiring to keep pace with competition. With the advent of digital marketing, how real estate businesses attracts, engages as well as converts clients has changed. The rise of the internet has brought a myriad of tools and strategies that can be utilized in boosting visibility and driving growth such as social media and search engine optimization (SEO). Let us delve deeply into the role played by digital marketing in revolutionizing the real estate industry.

Digital Marketing for the Real Estate Industry: Understanding the Landscape

The scope of digital marketing landscape for real estate is quite expansive with various platforms and techniques employed. Digital marketing has moved far from relying on printed ads or direct mail typical of traditional advertising campaigns since it uses online channels to reach people. Major aspects comprised are:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Improving your website’s Google position. For instance, using relevant keywords like “New York homes for sale,” would be beneficial in attracting organic traffic to a realtor site from potential buyers or sellers.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) allows for targeting specific keywords and demographics using platforms such as Google Ads. PPC campaigns can make your website get instant traffic and are especially useful in generating leads.

Social Media Marketing is where you engage with potential customers on channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. It paves the way for advertising based on target audience, content sharing, community establishment.

Content Marketing means producing valuable contents such as blog posts, videos, and infographics. Content marketing is a good way to establish your expertise in the real estate market and provides helpful information to possible clients.

Email Marketing entails personalizing emails sent to cultivate leads and maintain relationships with former clients. In addition, newsletters containing industry updates or promotional offers may be part of email marketing campaigns.

Getting Effective Digital Marketing for Real Estate Done Right

A well-built online presence is vital when it comes to attracting and retaining clients. Here are some strategies that you might want to employ:

Professional Website: In terms of user-friendliness, mobile responsiveness, and visual appealability among others features of your website it should posses high-quality property listings, simple ways to navigate pages through and obvious calls to action (CTAs).

Local SEO: Optimize my site for local keywords, so as to lure clients around you, which entails creating and optimizing local backlinks and Google My Business listings.

High-Quality Content: Frequently produce written or visual content that deals with widespread questions and concerns from your target market. Some of the topics may include tips on buying a house, market trends or neighborhood guides.

Leveraging Social Media in Digital Marketing for the Real Estate Industry

Through social media platforms, real estate professionals can connect well to their target audience. Here are ways through which you can make it happen:

Visual Content: Upload high-quality images/videos of properties, virtual tours and behind-the-scene looks. Visual content is very interesting and can be useful in demonstrating the uniqueness of property.

Targeted Advertising: Use social media platform’s targeting feature to reach particular demographic segments based on location, interests. This will make advertising more effective.

Engagement: Actively comment back on your audience’s comments/questions/complaints/remarks/feedbacks. Establishing relationships and responding to queries can enhance your reputation among customers because they would trust you better if they find that you could care about them.

Digital Marketing in Real Estate using Data and Analytics

You can make data-based decisions that will revolutionize your marketing efforts. How to use analytics effectively:

Performance Tracking: Measure website traffic, analyze user behavior and gauge conversion rates using applications such as Google Analytics. This helps to identify what is working and where there is room for improvement from this data.

A/B Testing: You will need to experiment with different ad copies, email subject lines plus landing page designs, which resonate best with your audience. A/B testing helps you refine your strategies for better outcomes.

Lead Tracking: Set up efficient systems for lead monitoring and control. Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to help you organize and nurture leads throughout the sales process.

Seamless User Experience in Digital Marketing for Real Estate

To convert visitors into customers, there must a be smooth user experience. Consider the following:

Fast Loading Times: Slow websites discourage potential clients Optimize your site speed in order to enhance users’ experience and reduce bounce rates.

Mobile Optimization: Most property searches happen on mobile devices Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and delivers consistent experiences across all devices.

Ease of navigation: Ensure that users can locate what they are seeking with ease. User satisfaction is enhanced by nice menus, a search function, and well-organized content.

Keeping Abreast of Digital Marketing Trends in Real Estate

The landscape for digital marketing is constantly changing. Here’s how to stay current with the latest trends and technologies;

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Look into AI-powered chatbots, predictive analytics, and personalized marketing. Through this, you will be able to improve interactions with clients and streamline your processes.

Virtual Reality (VR): You should possibly think about utilizing VR to give virtual property tours. This type of immersive technology can allow potential buyers to see properties from their homes.

Influencer Marketing: Consider partnering with local influencers or industry experts who will help you reach out to more people and gain more trust from them. Influencers can help promote your brand and attract a targeted audience.

Conclusion

Digital marketing for the real estate industry is a powerful tool for professionals looking to thrive in a competitive market. By building a strong online presence, leveraging social media, utilizing data-driven insights, and staying updated with trends, you can enhance your marketing efforts and achieve greater success. Embracing these digital strategies will not only help you reach a wider audience but also build lasting relationships with clients in the ever-evolving real estate landscape.

[northwest-cryptid]

Using internet forums is the equivalent to "touching grass" to me.

Hear me out on this, what do people mean when they say "touch grass" exactly? Well they're basically telling you that your views are too centralized on your internet culture. You said or did something that would be fine within your virtual space, but not in "real life" so to speak. Touching grass is to say, go outside; experience a world away from your computer.

Internet forums typically have their own moderation, and are likely to have their own cultures and sub-cultures. From what I've experienced a lot of forums are hot spots for people who either seek refuge from the centralized internet culture of twitter, reddit, tiktok, and tumblr; or who simply wish to discuss the specific topic the forums are based around.

The key difference between internet forums and reddit is that reddit still operates as a sort of social media. You have all these upvote down vote politics. In other words, if you don't fit in, we'll all down vote your post into oblivion. You'll be ousted from the community, and more popular or "more trusted" users will speak over you.

Most forums do have these sort of cliches all the same, but also lack the voting system, so if someone doesn't like your words; they have to match that with their own words. This leads to a really interesting back and forth.

If you take the bait and lash out, you typically get removed by a moderator, but that's on you and your actions. Congratulations, you failed the test; you didn't touch grass. If you instead walk the walk and talk the talk you can easily turn the tide in your favor; remember they can't be "voted" most right by the community.

This means if you come to a forum post talking about say, board games; and you say "I really like THIS board game" and then some other user comes on and replies to you spewing the r-slur or something. You now have a chance to engage with this, or simply just ignore/block them and move on. They are one voice in a sea of many, and here's the real truth. If everyone on the forum acts like they do, then you can just leave and jump forums to a better site.

On the other hand, however; you can meet them head on with a reply of your own, with the good of the forum in mind of course. See if you match their energy, you will likely be ousted as you're new here. However if you explain that you merely wish to discuss the topic and that their slanderous words and rude remarks are not only unnecessary but unwarranted and off-topic. Now you're merely citing the rules of the forum, you're just trying to keep the discussion civil; there's no need to lash out like that on their part, and you're politely making that known. Moderators can't just look away from that because it's public, so they might issue a warning or something, if this continues the offending user will often be removed even if they're a senior member.

I've seen this happen first hand, the thing you need to understand is that a lot of these forums have their own cultures and MANY have the culture of "freedom of speech" meaning you can say whatever you want on the basis that "you can" and nothing more.

The flip side to this is issuing the challenge of "why?" They are now put on the defensive because they need to find some actual reasoning to defend why they attacked you so abrasively. The truth being that they were hopeful you'd lash out and they could point and laugh at the sensitive leftist or whatever. When you meet them in a manner that shows you carry yourself with a level of self respect they didn't expect you to have; you show them, and the forum at large; that you're not some stereotype they can exploit for popularity points.

More often than not, this won't be the case; but it happens from time to time; especially if you care about being unique online. Which is ironic since a lot of the forums I visit talk openly about how much they favor the individual and how they hate the hivemind nature of sites like tumblr and twitter.

My point here is that yes, Twitter, Tumblr, Tiktok, Reddit, Facebook, the lot of them; they do have a sort of centralized mind set. It's because there's so much crossuse between them. You carry tumblr's values with you to twitter, and then to Reddit; and then to TikTok. Along with that you enforce a sort of standard culture whether you intend to or not.

A lot of us do this because we feel, genuinely; that our culture is ultimately morally good. That's not a bad thing, but it makes you sheltered all the same. Going onto various small sites and internet forums might anger you at first since it's unlikely they follow the same code of ethics even if they align with your political views.

I witnessed a forum in which users were primarily left leaning and yet some users still insisted they had the freedom of speech to use slurs that honestly, shouldn't just be said openly no matter who you are in my opinion. Of course I had to "touch grass" and realize it's not my place to step in an argue with them. At the end of the day this would reinforce their belief in "people like me" and instead I'd opt to simply not engage with these users.

Forums are not social media, you can't really get "notes" or "likes" or whatever that amount to anything. You can't become a celebrity there, and more often than not these days they're populated by a good few hundred people at most. You stand to gain literally nothing from making your posts, other than the interaction of your peers.

Tumblr fails to meet the same criteria as we don't often use responses the same way as a forum.

For example if I make a post on tumblr that states a question like "is anyone playing any fun video games lately?" I might get a half dozen replies (not reblogs) that all say various things; I might get a reblog or two that say "oh I'm playing this or that" sure, but they're not all listed alongside each other.

On a proper forum this would be made into a thread, my post would have substance to it. I would still ask the same question in the title, but the post itself might include information about what I've been playing or whatever.

Then a reply would literally be posted under it similar to how a reblog shows up, this would bump the thread but more importantly, a new user viewing the post could directly quote things said earlier, or simply add their own response.

Then another reply would come in and be able to see all previous responses, they wouldn't be hidden in the reply section or under a specific reblog. I wouldn't need to be following any specific users; I'd simply see everything anyone has posted about this topic.

I'm not really going anywhere specific with this post, my brain is fried from not having enough food or water today unfortunately since I'm sick. However it's interesting to be able to skim a post and it's responses and immediately get a sense for not just what everyone's talking about, what their views are and how they discuss them; but also the general culture of the thread based on the responses.

If I say "anyone playing fun games?" and everyone is saying things like Call of Duty or Halo or Shooter Game 42432 you kinda get a vibe for who these people are or at least what this thread is about, you're less likely to come in with "yea I've been playing fuckin' Nerd Shit #3" which is both good and bad, it's good because you can get a strong sense of what the atmosphere is before you make that post; but it's bad because given the atmosphere you may not make that post; even if in reality everyone would immediately respond "oh man I've heard that one's really good but I haven't played it yet" or something.

Forums are interesting and they lend themselves to a sort of community I've sorely missed since the old web "died"

[thatdisneyboy]

Hey It's Me Again

6/21/2024

I'm gonna start throwing dates on these since tumblr has gotten less user friendly over the years. Haven't done one of these in a while, but it's time. I wanna try to be short. I'm still struggling. Every time I feel like I'm getting better, I actually think about it and I'm maybe worse off. I just know how to hide things better, even from myself. But if I sit with it for long enough, the pain comes flooding back. I don't have any friends to talk to anymore. The one that I had is so busy trying to essential oils, crystals and will everything to be better that she doesn't even talk to me on the human level anymore. She sends me these videos about those things and I just wanna actually talk. Not use this random video that I don't even give a damn about or believe in any way as a jump off point for me to give my thoughts. And then that's the only communication we have now because when I try to start conversations beyond that, I'm met with nothing. So that's been a huge blow to me. It's especially hard because I just learned that one of my moots over on twitter took his own life recently and he had so many friends around him. So anytime I hear about suicide, it does give me pause because I am not in a good place and people like me are higher risk for completing that if we attempt. So it just makes me nervous because it does go through my head when I see news like that.

My job still sucks, but I'm only doing one more year. It's interesting because I was ready to leave at the end of this year. That was actually my plan. But once I talked to my students, one really changed my mind. All of them wanna see me happy and don't want me to continue dealing with the bs that my job puts me through, but one (who will be a senior this year) shifted my perspective a tad. He was one of the main ones telling me to do what I gotta do and he'll be okay. But I saw how disappointed he was that I wouldn't be there for his senior year. And so that made me realize that if I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna do it the right way. I'm gonna approach the school year like it's my last one with them and really make the most of it. I'll get my seniors through to college, get my junior to a steady point, get my sophomores to their upperclassmen years with strong skills behind them, get my 8th graders into HS and have the rest of my kids in a good place moving forward. So hopefully going into the year with a different mindset will help me disengage from the stupidity from upper leadership at this company that I will inevitably have to navigate. So yeah, it's been bad, but I feel at peace. Also because I know I will be reporting them soon and I might bring up a lawsuit. Idk.

Finally, I told Preston that I have a crush on him a few weeks ago. It didn't go bad but it didn't go good either. I would've loved to have had him share similar feelings. He doesn't. Or he didn't really say much other than thank you and that he didn't know. But I kinda just let him know that I had no expectations and he could do whatever he wanted with the information. I'm probably gonna end up alone though. So that does make me sad. But I've been prepared. Kinda felt like there was no one out here for me back in high school. Just never worked out with any of the folks that I liked.

Anyway, that's all. Short little post today. I'm sad. I'm struggling big time. But I'm steel here (s/o to Tisha Campbell). And I'm trying. It's rough, but I'm working on things.

[eartharoundsun]

Feminist – The Master of Social Media Presentation: Twitter – “Be Strong and Straightforward”, Facebook – “Everything must be in Moderation”, and Tumblr – “Just be Yourself”!

“You’d better manage yourself online!”

“Be careful with what you say on social media!”

“Your careless online image will destroy you! Pay attention to what you post!”

Hurt… but it sounds so familiar, right? Too often, we – under the female gender – always being criticized as irresponsible social media users and are required to control our online image better (Dobson & Ringrose 2016). But is that the reality? Think again! Girls are truly the social media game controller! Understanding the unique “vibe and behavior” of each platform, females know how to pick up different identities that work best for them on specific digital media. By analyzing “digital characteristics” on three platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, are you ready to be surprised by how “tricky” a girl could be to use social media in multiple ways to participate in feminist activism? Okay, let’s dive in…

Twitter – “Be Strong and Straightforward”

Has anyone ever imagined a platform that is open for hot debates, controversial discussions, and well, curse words of course? Twitter gets your back! This is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to create brief bursts of text (known as “tweets”) of under 280 characters and is commonly organized around themed “hashtags” to facilitate communication between users (Keller 2019, p.5). Knowing the Twitter nature of prioritizing fast-moving content (both original and retweet), girls frequently develop hashtags to widely raise awareness of feminist issues like sexual abuse, racism, etc. on this platform (Keller et al. 2018, Loza 2014, Thrift 2014). #Metoo was one of the greatest feminist movements on Twitter since this hashtag has been used over 19 million times. On average, more than 55,000 tweets sharing personal stories and statements using the #Metoo hashtag were shared daily (Anderson & Toor 2020). Downright and straightforward are what women show off through this platform

Facebook – “Everything must be in Moderation”

Because of the “authentic identity” requirements and “imagined audience” concerns, honestly, this social media is far from an ideal platform for girls to fight for themselves!  With large profits coming from selling user databases to advertisers (Bivens 2015), individuals are required to create a “real self” by filling in first and last names when creating a Facebook profile. However, this could be triggering the spread of feminist activities, especially among teenage girls due to the fear of becoming the haters’ “targeted goal” in real life if they know too much about their personal information and identity. Moreover, Facebook's “friend circle” is also a huge concern. Since most of the “friends” users have are real ones – parents, siblings, etc., so of course, no one wants to freak out their grandma by reporting personal statements of being sexually racist! “Plus point”, because Facebook prohibits controversial debate about sexism, girls instead need to replace with “repost” less debatable content like comic feminist memes or sexist advertisements (Keller 2019, p.7). Moderation, conservative, and careful will be what I will describe feminist activities on Facebook

Tumblr – “Just be Yourself”

Is it too much to dream about a vibrant “individual-centered” long-post blogging platform where everyone is supported to be themselves, freely sharing whatever they want, build their own kingdom, and simply, just be as crazy and creative as they want without the pressure of being judged and criticized? Not anymore! Tumblr is here! With no personal profiles or “friend network” requirements, anonymity is Tumblr's biggest strength making girls insanely jump into this “heaven” to practice feminism (Keller 2019, p.7). With the nature of “nobody knows who anybody is” and “keep going without knowing what you are going to find”, Tumblr is like a perfect “black hole” where females can comfortably express their true feelings and personal issues (Keller 2019, p.8). Deep and authentic are what women normally show on Tumblr

Okay, let's just sum up a bit what our girls are doing online!

Even though we still need to face the sad reality that a “risk-free” digital platform will never have existed and feminist teenage girls and women – particularly those of queer, poor, color, or disabled – are now facing a higher risk of being social media targeted “hate speech (Keller 2019, p.9), just don’t be afraid! The period when women patiently tolerated defamation is over and feminism is growing stronger than ever before!

In the final words, I just wanna send a big heart to every female in this world and a quick reminder that you guys are smarter and stronger than you think! Together, let’s create a better place!

Reference

Anderson, M., & Toor, S 2020, ‘How social media users have discussed sexual harassment since #MeToo went viral’, Swinburne Library, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/11/how-social-media-users-have-discussed-sexual-harassment-since-metoo-went-viral/

Dobson, A. S., & Ringrose, J 2016, ‘Sex education: Pedagogies of sex, gender, and shame in the schoolyards of tagged and exposed’, Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 16, 8–21

Jessalynn, K 2019, “Oh, She’s a Tumblr Feminist”: Exploring the Platform Vernacular of Girls’ Social Media Feminisms, Social Media + Society, Volume 5 issue:3, p.5-9

Keller, J., Mendes, K., & Ringrose, J 2018, ‘Speaking “Unspeakable” things: Documenting digital responses to rape culture’, Journal of Gender Studies, 27(1), 22–36

Loza, S 2014, ‘Hashtag feminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the other #FemFuture’, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, 5, https://adanewme- dia.org/2014/07/issue5-loza/

Thrift, S 2014, ‘YesAllWomen as feminist meme event’, Feminist Media Studies, 14, 1090–1092

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

Pink News’ response:

“A letter published in The Guardian has criticised the use of the word ‘queer’ and LGBTQ+ people have spoken – to say we’re here and we’re most certainly queer.

The legacy media publication shared the message from a 66-year-old Karl Lockwood on Friday (13 January) in its section of letters sent in by readers.

In response to the England and Wales census – which revealed that 15,000 of the 1.5 million non-heterosexual people in the regions refer to themselves as queer – the openly gay Brighton resident wrote that he found the word to be “derogatory.”

“I suspect that many of the others, like me, consider the term to be insulting… and certainly not ‘reclaimed,” he added.

Lockwood then went on to accuse activists of having “encouraged the media” to use the word to label the LGBTQ+ community, even comparing it to “the N-word.”

“It would seem a small minority of activists has encouraged the media to use the word without considering its offensiveness to many people. You wouldn’t use the N-word, so don’t use the Q-word.”

The published letter was met with almost unanimous criticism by queer people – and people who use and celebrate the word – who both lambasted the notion that queer is still a dirty word despite a long history of reclamation by LGBTQ+ civil rights groups.

“I’m pretty sure that the popular chant at Pride events and political protests back in the 80s and 90s wasn’t, ‘We’re here, we’re Q-word, get used to it,'” a disgruntled Twitter user wrote.

“The people allowed to reclaim a slur are those it was aimed at,” another pointed out. “15,000 people felt it worked for them, Karl doesn’t get to police that.”

Others expressed their shock at Lockwood’s comparison of “the Q-word” to “the N-word”, despite the blatant differences between their usage.

“Tell me you’re a privileged, white gay without telling me you’re a privileged white gay,” one user wrote.

“Sir, you used queer twice in your letter before choosing to initialise it so you could compare it to a word so bad you wouldn’t type it out once.”

Queer woman responds to queer letter criticising the word queer, and it’s very queer

The following day, the newspaper published a swift rebuttal to the original letter, which urged Karl to “accept that the word, and the world, has moved on.”

Emma Joliffe of St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, wrote that the descriptive use of the word had shifted drastically over the past few decades, being used by activists to “signify our Pride.”

The self-proclaimed queer woman wrote: “Karl Lockwood was born in the late 1950s. He would have come of age with the gay rights movement, through the decriminalisation of homosexuality, towards gay power.

“‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it’ was, of course, a well-known chant. ‘Queer’ has been reclaimed by members of our community since the 1970s.”

Joliffe went on to explain that it was unfortunate that the word “clearly still holds some pain and distress” for Lockwood, while the community uses it for “power and resistance.”

“Rather than policing the terms used by others – especially considering that, for millennials, the word they were more likely to hear as a term of abuse was ‘gay’ in the early 00s – perhaps Karl should accept that the word, and the world, has moved on.””

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