#findings

[elfhunk]

nobody understands my beautiful daughter.

[theneighborhoodwatch]

MESSAGE TO ALL MAILMEN

PLEASE SURVIVE

[kryptonbabe]

From I Love Lucy S6E13 - Lucy and Superman (1957).

One of the reasons I love this I Love Lucy episode is because at no point Superman is called "the actor who plays Superman" or "George Reeves", which means he is actually Superman in the universe of Lucy, which means I Love Lucy is part of the DC multiverse.

[buggyblinkies]

hellooooooo would you happen to have any stamps or blinkies of the Muppetssssss

And these by eyebleedingarts

(First 6 stamps by me, rest from DA, blinkies from free-blinkies on the wayback machine and gifcities)

[pigeon-feet]

enormous woman found at walmart

Tabanus atratus

[ruby-pink]

same

[satuwn]

ooo im curious..

what flavor/s is Gummi and has there ever been a sour version of it? if not would they look about the same just w the sour sugar crumbs or would she be pretty different?

i think i mentioned her body is artificial strawberry/raspberry and her tail is tutti frutti!

and hehe why yes there is a sour version of her, themed for this month too! her body taste would be artificial grape flavor, her ears and wings would be orange and lemon, and her tail would probs be like a sour apple! shes sooo sour shed leave sores in your mouth so try at your own risk! x3 there is also an easter version of her where shes a marshmallow bunny but i havent drawn it yet u.u

[re-locative]

Research findings: How are people creating a sense of togetherness online?

The everyday inventiveness of translocal relationship maintenance

I'm excited to share some early insights from our latest study. Some of you may remember it from when it was distributed: a survey about how people who sustain relationships online create a sense of being in the same place, even at a distance.

Even now, online platforms are marching towards a future of standardised, formless, and profoundly placeless design. But relationships need place (Tuan, 1979), and people will continue to fashion new tactics to address their everyday needs. So, how do people in translocal relationships play with/around these technological limitations? How do they foster shared places on platforms that aren't designed for it?

That's what our study sought to uncover, and here's what we found...

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Our deepest thanks to all who participated in the survey! We had 44 respondents—almost twice as many as we were hoping for—and more importantly, we got a pretty broad slice of translocal connections across the world:

Our original focus was on long-distance families and romantic relationships, mainly because people conventionally assume physical closeness and cohabitation in those relationships. But in practice, the data we gathered contained accounts of all kinds of relationships, so we expect the findings to be relevant (in varying degrees) to many kinds of online connection as well.

Across the data, a few themes showed up repeatedly, and through an extensive process of coding and clustering, we've distilled it into five themes, or key drivers of practices in virtual placemaking:

1. Synchronicity ⌚

People seek to act in concert and in temporal proximity, to feel a sense of relatedness—be that by experiencing media together, collaborating on a project, or just feeling collocated via a background voice call. Voice calls often scaffolded these kinds of synchronous activities—sound is a great vector for conveying simultaneity/"at the same time."

2. Persistence 📌

We talked about synchronous interactions above. Asynchronous interactions, on the other hand, assert the "being in the same space." This requires virtual spaces to not simply disappear or refresh when the session is closed: you're able to leave artefacts for others to discover even when you're offline or "in the background," and they accumulate over time. That's a core trait of a real place (as discussed in past research).

3. Emotional connection/depth 🫂

We know from other research that long-distance couples favour text messaging. Verbal communication is paramount in relationship deepening because it supports precise expressions of care and affirmation. But it can be asserted by other expressions too, like offers of help, favours and gifts—implicitly or explicitly indicating that one has the other person in one's thoughts, as well as their interests, well-being, and goings-on.

4. Physical linkage 🔗

Despite the focus on virtual spaces, many respondents saw great importance in anchoring their bonds in physical space, and used technologies as windows, or bridges, linking those spaces together. Using video calls as "windows" to have meals together, virtual house tours where the smartphone acts as a surrogate for the person on the other end, buying the same game board and playing against each other by replicating each other's moves...our data was replete with creative ways of bridging physical divides.

5. Co-creation 🖼️📝

Collaborative narratives and creation uniquely allow for interactors to explore and cohabit a shared mental place, in which they have an equal stake and are emotionally engaged. It's a way of being psychically co-present through roleplay and active imagination. Our data was full of mentions of collaborative creative work and narratives, from Dungeons and Dragons to building worlds together to making art of imagined alternate realities.

---

Other neat insights:

Rather than ever being confined to a single platform, almost everyone inhabited and interwove practices across different platforms/media types, each with its own utility, affect, and meaning: this is what Madianou calls "polymedia life." Think playing games on a virtual board while discussing it in a text chat, watching a show together on a streaming website while discussing it in a call, playing Wordle independently and checking in with the group chat to see what others thought, etc. This was almost universal across the dataset!

There were a lot of unique practices described in the dataset (i.e. instances where one respondent was the only person in the dataset who did that thing) - and yet it was never described as a practice we deliberately designed to solve a problem. This everyday inventiveness among people in translocal/transnational relationships has become the core of our research interest.

Lots of intergenerational connection (parent/child, grandparent/grandchild, aunt/uncle/niece) was evidenced - and a strong skew towards text chat, video calls, and voice calls for these. Video games are far more common among romantic relationships.

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That's all for this post—I'll be back soon (very soon) to talk about what comes next.

[delicioustarong]

Typing in "Theraprism" shows us this image

The translation says "the old one" so now im wondering who the old one is 乁⁠(⁠ ⁠•⁠_⁠•⁠ ⁠)⁠ㄏ

Any ideas guys???

[s0larize]

forgotten things

[elfhunk]

what did they mean by this.

[theneighborhoodwatch]

my dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “homewarming party” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd.

me: yeah whatever man. i don’t feel shit.

5 minutes later: dude i swear this is just remderem

my buddy eddie white knuckle gripping the armrests: i think i need to go home

[kryptonbabe]

Mark Taylor as Plastic Man in the live action segments of The Plastic Man Comedy / Adventure Show, the show ran from 1979 to 1981

[buggyblinkies]

Creatures

[balluprojects]

Ivy Swan, 2023

@ Parque José Gomes Ferreira, Lisboa, Portugal am i'm the only one seeing it?? xD