#i've become tumblr illiterate

[levieske]

why does my masterlist not show up??? uggh

[pa-pa-plasma]

okay, because I haven't seen any posts mentioning specifically where/when to put readmores:

if your writing is longer than 300 words, put a readmore after the first paragraph. please. i am begging you. they are more likely to be reblogged when we aren't worried about inflicting a wall of text onto our unsuspecting followers. the readmore option looks like

or

start a new paragraph & then click that. it will then look like

if you are on mobile you start a new paragraph & then type :readmore:. it will look like

thank you for coming to my readmore tedtalk or whatever. happy writing

[bisexualchrissycunningham]

Hello pals! Just stopping in to say hi. I haven't felt much of a draw to Tumblr for the past few months cause my new hyperfixation is un-Tumblrlike.. financial literacy (and making extra money!!) I'm reading books and listening to podcasts and figuring out the status of my pension & other retirement savings I'd never given much thought to and all the things I need to do to change my relationship with money and get out of debt.

I've set a goal to be debt-free by March 2026. I still have these moments of total and utter shame that I'm 37 and have been so ignorant about personal finance that I didn't even realize I was living outside my means for years, but one thing I've learned from all the info I've been gobbling up is that way more people are financially illiterate than should be, and all the shame that's been instilled in us around money helps capitalism thrive. And we can't have capitalism thriving, comrades.

Also, work has been a nightmare. I'm trying my best to keep the work stress compartmentalized to work hours so it isn't following me around at night, and I'm sort of doing okay at it.

I also wanna say: I have been teetering on the edge of becoming a T*ylor hater. I simply can't deal with.. pretty much anything she's done in the past year, and I am inwardly cringing thinking about the new album, while also knowing I will listen to it immediately.

Anyway, that's the life update. I hope everybody is thriving and feeling great and even if you're not, you'll make your way to a good place soon! 💚💜💚

[anaoyuo]

Alright, so before this becomes a cool super professional account, I'm turning to you, my beloved tumblr people. 

I really don't want this to be a me talking bs blog cause that's for twt. But I've been thinking about sharing the chapters of the pwts series here. Thing is, I'd give adg a bit of an edit first cause I just know there are some chapters that make me wanna be illiterate.

I also have a lot of draft scenes that didn't make it into fg and adg, and I considered sharing those too as a separate work on here, but then again, there's a reason why they didn't make it into the final storyline. Still, I have them, lots of them.

Your thoughts, my 10 tumblr people?

[bloody-teared-angel]

Shipping and Fandom used to be fun

Buckle up, long post incoming - will be speaking from my own experience.

My first ever fandom was Transformers. I joined it on Tumblr, I believe in....2013? And on Instagram, 2016-2017. I eventually go back in due to nostalgia so Idk how that fandom is in 2024 but back then it was the most welcoming fandom I could ever been in.

OCs were on the rise, ppl were interested in them, asking for lore even commissioning them themselves, asking permission if they could write about them - OCxCanon was also very popular and overall well received. Whoever made a new OC, they would get adopted into the fandom.

Generally speaking, ppl didn't care what you were shipping, everyone was in their own little corner, doing their own thing, respecting one another.

What I'm trying to say, you could ship the most unconventional ships and the general reaction would be: "Why?" "Idk, I'm having fun." Or "I found it intriguing" or "Because I can."

And that was it. No one pried anymore, no one demanded you spill out your trauma and acted like a moral police of what is acceptable in their eyes and what was not.

Ppl could be shipping Megatron with Arcee or Ratchet and no one would bat an eye, people were having fun - the same went for not liking a character. No one would accuse one another of being 'media illiterate'

"Why don't you like this character?" "Idk, I don't vibe with him." "Ok, cool."

And that was it.

Where I noticed it first would be BNHA/MHA fandom - that fandom is rotten beyond belief the last time I tried to enjoy it but the author made me drop it too with his decisions.

(On Instagram OCs were largely ignored and there was 'No Fun Allowed' type of feel which made me last about....2 months, while trying and giving it a chance)

Probably the biggest one would be Naruto - yes, I dislike Hinata and Sakura, along with NaruHina and SasuSaku but that's due to poor development and their respective fandoms. You were not allowed to say that the ships were poorly developed nor that the female characters are flawed, you were labeled as misogynistic and sexist and I don't know what else. You were not allowed to ship noncanon ship, otherwise the shippers of the canon ones would throw a tantrum in your inbox or notes.

Now that I think about it, HH/HB - Naruto - BNHA/MHA fandoms are.....strikingly similar in that regard.

With this post, some might call me a hypocrite and I won't blame you, I also had some level of immaturity back in the day, which I'm cringing and laughing over now.

There's also a reason I stopped joining most fandoms at the height of their popularity, for the people in those fandoms - most of the time - are riding that high and are almost impossible to talk to, any sort of criticism for said shows or characters are met with hostility, etc.

And listen I've been in the fandom during the woobification of MCU!Loki, I had my fair share of immaturity - i was a kid - now that I am older, I enjoy villains for the sake of being villains and fucked up stuff for the sake of fucked up stuff.

(I'm going to make a statement later down the line so be ready to unfollow, just a heads up - no, I'm not in any drama, just making something clear since I don't want to be perceived as a hypocrite)

Which brings me to HH/HB - why did I follow it at the height of it?

Because I was invested. I had hope.

I enjoyed the Pilot back in 2020, I sat trough entirety of S1 of HB until 'Mammon Special' which then caused me to drop it, due to becoming disinterest and fed up with the double standard and picky narrative.

I had hope, that HH would live up to its hype. It did not for me.

Then the allegations kept coming out and I had lost all hope, the fandom had a level of immaturity that made me turn away completely.

(And I've been there during the r*ylo hype, some of the stuff they came up with was abysmal)

What I'm trying to say that back then everyone was in their own little corner, doing their own thing and then I don't know what happened and it was just influx of 'Fun not allowed' type of things, that made fandoms less fun.

It might not make sense, so I'm open to civil discussions and questions.

(Oh, and, the HP fandom made me be prepared for anything, just saying)

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

I've developed a real reticence towards talking too much about my life, either online or with people outside my immediate family (and even then...) over the last several years. I guess it started in 2016, when expressing my unfiltered opinions contributed to—or really, just accelerated—the failure of my one romantic relationship. The anniversary of that's come up, so I guess I realized quite suddenly I needed to clam up more online about seven years ago exactly.

I mean, I've naturally been shy most of my life, so to some extent this is just reversion to the mean after discovering I could speak at least sort of freely online in my late high school and early college years. But I've also long had an oversharing streak, as well as a foolishly honest one. To some extent this just feels like another facet of whatever complex of mental conditions I have.* The regret and embarrassment often follows a social interaction immediately after it's done.

But I wonder if another factor is noticing how bad my parents are at communicating succinctly. Right now, Mom is in a Zoom book group, but it feels like she's just talking about the family's problems to an audience rather than, you know, participating in a book group. And she's the better of the two! The more I witness this sort of behavior, the more determined I become avoid being the annoying oversharer monopolizing the conversation with the unpleasant details of their medical conditions and household repair efforts.

I've probably over-corrected at this point, but human brains are notoriously bad controllers (at least on the emotional front) so who's really surprised? The negative feedback to oversharing is very visible, while the lost positive feedback to not interacting is unseen. A decade of getting yelled at because Tumblr users are functionally illiterate will do that, eventually. Never mind the friends I've made here; my brain discounts that. I'm not sure why, but it sure does. I have hypotheses but they're difficult to explain and not particularly convincing. Maybe I just got busy and spent less time here, so coming back to a short dash and barely any notes made any negative responses a bigger portion of the total.

I don't really have a point to all this, besides to say that I'm probably more approachable than I seem and I don't like how aloof I've become. It's just a response to various events largely outside of my control, coupled with the whole difficulty of navigating social scenarios for people with brains like mine.

*The only thing they ever managed to pin on me as a kid was auditory processing disorder, but that seems pretty obviously a member of the predictive processing issues cluster that includes stuff like ADHD and high-function autism.

[translesbianvampire]

gay bitch fangirls over always sunny

i've just realized that tumblr is the perfect place for a queer bitch to nerd out about her favorite show. i finished it a month ago and...oof, i love this thing. i find it weirdly beautiful in a way. i enjoy seeing the most dysfunctional people put to air's misadventures, and i am definitely one of the disturbed people this show comforts lmao.

despite functionally/nominally about being horrible people doing horrible things, the gang somehow never quite lose every scrap of humanity they have; i guess by virtue of being white trash instead of upper-class. there are times when the gang are appalled at the atrocities someone ELSE comments, and sometimes when even they feel maybe they're going too far. (they usually don't things like "no" stop em tho...)

i also love the way it weaponizes every facet of being a sitcom, and uses them to comment on what happens within the show: +you can just pop in at any time during the show's run and not be too lost, not extremely reliant on past events & arcs

-the gang experiencing extremely traumatic events is not an "arc" or something that is ever dealt with/brought up again, considering their ol' reliable is drinking it down & not talking about it

-as sitcoms go on, they typically become sadder, as it just gets depressing that this group of people literally has nothing else to do with their lives.

+depressing is the point.

-as sitcoms go on, characters typically undergo "flanderization", where previously minor aspects of their character become their entire personality within the show. typically is extremely annoying

+the gang functions as a vicious echo chamber that they are trapped within, as no one in the outside world can stand being with them. also, they are CHRONIC abusers of alcohol & a million other substances like glue. it makes sense that charlie only becomes more illiterate, considering his habits (which include eating cat food & huffing glue) never really change

-to keep sitcoms running, the characters remain perfectly static throughout, and it is only really the situations & people around them that change

+the core of what makes the characters who they are doesn't change much over 15 seasons, but they DO grow with the times; just very, VERY slowly. i think they've handled this adeptly; in season 10, they eased off dennis' creep-oness in the second episode by having him be on the RECEIVING end of his weird rating system, in one of the most hilarious & quotable moments of a show that is already hilarious & quotable throughout. I'M A FIVE STAR MAN!!!!

there's prolly even more i can't think of. but it is such BRUTAL satire of...basically anything i CAN think of. it's this satire that gives depth to, what on the surface, might appear as a banal show that only exists to be offensive. the writers actually do NOT write to offend anybody (except maybe rly stuffy stuck-up ppl lmao)! it started as basically just wanting to write a sitcom that's "real", about a group of friends that are NEVER there for each other (tho they ARE there for each other, sometimes!). and this ended up being the perfect vehicle to satirize a LOT of facets about american life.

i also LOVE the way sunny handles queerness! it is not something that inherently makes you a better NOR a worse person, but it's also smth that always deserves respect, no matter who the queer person is. this is where its sitcom format works beautifully yet again; after mac's genuinely moving coming out moment as the s13 finale, s14 starts off...the way any other season starts off, and i LOVE that.

(sidenote: i don't think mac's brief coming out then re-entering the closet in s11 is an issue! that's real life. a friend of mine realized she was prolly trans, then decided she wasn't, and recently re-realized that she is lol. THAT'S LIFE!!!! tho, it would've been an issue if mac NEVER came out i think, but they had him come out in s12, and come out beautifully to his dad in s13)

i think always sunny succeeds at having...let's say, "very morally complicated" characters, while not accidentally glorifying them as much as the sopranos or breaking bad (tho i still love those shows hehe), while still having them be human. i think it is a beautifully human show. the show does not lie in the SLIGHTEST about who these people are, yet i am still excited to see another season with this gang i somehow do still root for. it shows us EVERYTHING about who these people are with less shame than we think about ourselves. we share in their every high, every low [of which there are many], and everything in between. and that's what bein' human is all about.

[typhonbaalhammon]

About Wuthering Heights

So I've finally read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and I just felt like this is the kind of thing you post about on Tumblr.

I make no guarantees that these observations will be new or interesting to you if you have read the book, in fact they're probably old hat if you have

Here be spoilers for the novel.

Ok so the first thing that struck me is that it's one of these novels where a character Has An Accent.

For some reason English writers just looove to have a character with an accent and take great pain to transcribe it, in spite of the fact (or perhaps because of the fact), that if you haven't heard the accent itself, you won't have a clue how to read them. (This is because the English orthographic system is absolutely terrible and completely inadequate for giving phonetic indications. It's not even good for "standard" English).

So anyway I had a painful time making anything out of Joseph's dialog because he has a Yorkshire accent, here are some excerpts :

« Aw sud more likker look for th’ horse,’ he replied. ‘It ‘ud be tuh more sense. Bud, Aw can look for norther horse, nur man uf a neeght loike this »

« Thank Hivin for all! All warks togither for gooid tuh them as is chozzen, and piked aht froo' th' rubbidge! Yah knaw whet t' Scripture ses— »

« "Whet are ye for?" he shouted. "T' maisters dahn i' t'fowld. Goa rahnd by th' end ut' laith, if yah went tuh spake tull him. »

Thankfully he's not too important a character, although he is present from the beginning to the end and always here to make me stumble with his "shoos" and "ai".

Otherwise, I'm really struck by the contrast between what people talk about when they talk about the book, and what's actually in there. The love triangle and the tormented passion between Cathy and Heathcliff really doesn't make up the bulk of the book.

I can see why nobody gives a damn about Lockwood (the first narrator) and Nelly Dean is in fact relatively unsympathetic.

But really most of the characters are.

This is not in fact a romantic book, it's a book about hateful people (chief among them Heathcliff) doing hateful things to each other or to innocent victims, including literally torturing innocent puppies.

Very well written and convincing, you understand completely why they are as they are, but it's quite bleak. It's also a book about grief because for a book where nobody murders anybody, there's a remarkably high bodycount.

I guess it's realistic (in real life the rev. Patrick Brontë outlived his wife and all of his six children so you can see where that was coming from).

And so that makes the ending a bit strange, in the sense that I don't think anyone can join Nelly Dean celebrating Catherine Jr's marriage to puppy-torturer and illiterate brute Hareton Earnshaw, but maybe that's the point.

But overall there's a sense of claustrophobia from this novel and the least understandable part of it is why do characters who manage to leave the moors later come back.

Isabella is probably the character with the least miserable life because although she's a victim of manipulation and (maybe) of assault, at least she gets the fuck out of Yorkshire.

Anyhoo, that's my impressions of this classic of English literature. I'm deeply impressed by the fact that all of its major characters have their own wikipedia page, last time I read a novel where this was the case was Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps perdu which is much, much, longer.

The first time I'd heard about Wuthering Heights was when I was a kid and I read a children's book (Kamo : l'Agence Babel by Daniel Pennac) about a kid who is learning English through a pen-pal agency and he becomes obsessed with his pen-pal, who is supposedly Catherine Earnshaw (yep). (and there turns out to be a somewhat logical diegetic explanation)

Somehow this book attracts fanfic writing.

[donnerpartyofone]

I've been doing a lot of research on a certain form of esoteric religious art, and I'm dismayed to discover that one of the most important and informative books on it is written in a voice that I find really irritating. I wouldn't say it's *badly written* by any means, but I have a hard time with a certain kind of self-righteous, aggressively worldly, hippy-dippy attitude that so often accompanies subjects and causes that are of genuine value. I'm taking this reading as a training exercise in separating values from aesthetics, something many of us find hard to do, and a lot of dysfunction comes from this problem.

I have a conservative relative who is addicted to a certain website that aggregates TikTok videos of whiny, spoiled, egotistical Gen Z'ers, many of whom just so happen to be trans; the collection is meant to prove that being insufferable is a native component of being young and trans, but of course if any of the video subjects were to stop being oversensitive exhibitionistic assholes, it wouldn't change the year they were born, or their relationship to their bodies. Actually, beyond condemning the generational and gender identities in question, the collection is really meant to condemn leftists, as if this form of insufferability has a causal (and contaminating) relationship with issues like civil rights, social welfare, and environmental protection. This is like saying that a person can become more or less republican with the addition or subtraction of country music from their cultural diet, or that enjoying NASCAR can make you more or less caucasian or American for that matter. I remember the night George W. Bush was elected, one of my more performatively lefty classmates (who was secretly really sexist and racist but we discovered that later) stomped around screaming "That fucking TEXAN! That fucking TEXAN!", as if being associated with a cowboy state were the worst thing he could think to say about W--who in fact was born in Connecticut, went to boarding school in Massachusetts, and graduated from Yale, one of the Ivy League schools that is the target of so much spite from anti-intellectual right wingers who hate on leftist elitism (and which is much more respected than the school we were in at the time, setting issues of class/money/nepotism aside). Just because certain cultural elements appear to coincide more with certain positions on the political spectrum, doesn't mean that the former is a necessary and proprietary consequence of the latter. These connections are just attractive because political orientation stirs up so much ire that it's exciting when you see a really obnoxious, embarrassing example of a person who you assume votes a certain way. It would be nice to be able to say that e.g. leftist thought is bad because of white people with dreadlocks and drum circles and poor hygiene, but those things aren't any more "left-wing values" than being a toothless illiterate yokel is a "right-wing value". These things are all just rude, generalizing distractions whose only content is emotional. The craziest version of this kind of red herring that I saw recently was a thread right here on tumblr dot com insisting that the monolithic Left is angling to legitimize pedophilia. The evidence at hand was a positive WaPo review of a play about the private agonies of pedophiles, and OP tried to further the idea that child sexual abuse is a historically leftist occupation by identifying NAMBLA as a left wing organization. Which is like, just not a really useful or lucid way to think about what NAMBLA wants and who in the fuck would ever support them, besides the fact it's not at all hard to find legions of protected pedophiles in the church and the monarchy and various other not-very-lefty places. BUT I DIGRESS. I must read this pompous-sounding religious art history book, I must absorb the information in it, even if I think the author's voice is a little too smug, a little too condescending, and a little too drum circle-y for my taste. She still has a point to make and I still need to hear it.

[pro-anomalocaris]

Now what? What the fuck do you mean, now what?

Cartoons are not real people.

If a real person voices them, they do not become a person. They are not real. If I do a funny voice and say, "Whee, I'm Jiffjeffjoff the Giraffe", Jiffjeffjoff is not a person. He has no rights. He is not a registered a citizen of the US. He does not have thoughts or feelings or a Social Security Number.

If voice determined personhood, mute people would not be people. Thankfully, no one else but you uses that as a metric of realness or personhood.

Porn actors are human beings. Not make-believe, I mean real people, really here, in the real, physical world. You can make up creepy headcanons that the dude jerking off for a camera is being human trafficked or the couple who make amateur porn in their own house is being held at gunpoint and forced to, but that's in your head, not a proven fact you have evidence for and also, they are still people. They are still different from fiction.

Sex workers are people. Cartoons are not.

"But if voice, then real???" is the most media illiterate take I've seen in my entire life and that is genuinely impressive considering it's tumblr.

And no, you can't "beg to differ" on if porn actors having sex is doing a real thing. It is a real person sexually interacting with another person. That is real. You can dislike it, you can say you don't want to view it as The One True Sex Between Man And Woman In Holy Matrimony or whatever, but it's still sex. Sex is not only two people you approve of having it in the right context under the right circumstances. Sex is people having sex, even if you don't approve of the circumstances that led there - otherwise we wouldn't have sex crime laws, or have a word for the concept of rape.

"What if fiction could be about things real people do? What then?" IT STILL WOULDN'T MAKE FICTION REAL OR REAL ACTS FICTIONAL!

I cannot state this clearly enough: something happening in both fiction and reality doesn't make it more fictional or more real. Make believe play pretend not real non-existent imaginary scenarios and the world around you are different!

The fact that people genuinely cannot understand that fiction and reality are different realms is baffling. "What then?" is being asked as if there is some powerful statement being made but there just isn't. "What if fiction reflected a lived experience? What if it had voices?" It wouldn't be real. No matter how much realism fiction aims for, it is fake.

A real genital really being touched by a real person is not fake.

The person who has that genitalia is a real person.

Pikachu is not.

I can't tell if "you, not the person comparing porn to fiction, are bringing real people into this" is a joke or if you genuinely cannot understand that porn actors are human beings who live in the real world.

I'm disturbed by this either way.

I really think everyone needs to truly internalize this:

Fictional characters are objects.

They are not people. You cannot "objectify" them, because they have no personhood to be deprived of. They have no humanity to be erased. You cannot "disrespect" them, because they are not real.

[ayearwithoutwater]

Nineteen.

When I applied to Yale Law School, my Yale 250 was underpinned by a personal anecdote from my accidental fifteen minutes of fame. In my case, "fame" is a stand-in for the brief notoriety I—or, rather, my creations—garnered across the internet between 2017 and 2018. I wrote, in 250 words, about becoming the incidental progenitor of an anti-capitalist meme genre as an extended metaphor for deliberate and political misinformation in the wake of the 2016 United States presidential legislation; I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that I was accused, on multiple occasions, of being a Russian agent of psychological operations. (Obviously, the accusations were false—I was clearly and quite honestly an American agent of psychological operations.)

I created the memes as my own way of venting into the void my frustrations with the world, eloquently summarized by the following quote. (I've attempted to source it and merely ended up at an Unused Icons Facebook post published on April 22, 2020.)

For a long time, I thought the Democrats were fighting valiantly but just overwhelmed by the oligarchy and the Republicans. Then I saw that the Democrats keep losing fights they should win and figured they must be just weak and ineffectual. Then I kept seeing them backing off without putting up a fight at all and decided they were gutless cowards. Finally I noticed that enough of them keep voting with the Republicans to always make sure the Republicans more or less win almost every fight, and that they keep starting from a Center position and bargaining to the Right, and eventually after enough of that it became impossible to ignore the only conclusion that actually fits the facts: The Democrats are not overmatched, they aren't weak, they aren't cowards…they're complicit.

Throughout the course of my life, I watched Americans vote against their own best interests. I watched politicians past their prime cling to power and/or trot out their cast of rotating villains, imperiling the populace under the guise of their omnipotence. I watched civil liberties be stripped away or pared back (an end to the constitutional right to abortion, the criminalization of and bounties placed upon transgender people), and I watched the people in power cede that very power to their lobbyist donors. United States President Jimmy Carter, in 2015, assessed that the vaunted American democracy is no more—it is now, in every respect, an oligarchy. So, when I undertook an unpaid internship as an unregistered foreign agent (for the sake of clarity and legality, this is being said in jest; I have never in my life been employed by any governmental agency, domestic or otherwise), I did so with the full intent of poking fun at "fake news."

Over 20% of Americans are illiterate. Not only do their mental facilities not include critical reasoning skills, one in five Americans cannot adequately parse written words. Over half of American adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level. This is, in part, by design: an uninformed population questions little and readily concedes power. But, I say that this is only "in part" to not absolve anyone of their complete and total abdication of intellectual curiosity. As human beings, creatures capable of rationality, to practice critical thought is not just a privilege, not just a right—it is an imperative.

I don't mean to get on my soapbox. I'm just explaining the logic and emotions underlying the memes I created, conveyed through absurdist pop culture humor because that's how I knew it would connect to my peers and because I was, at the time, a massive Mariah Carey fan. Moreover, as a Millennial who’d come of age with MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, BuzzFeed, etc., I was acutely aware of how information travels. It was, therefore, natural that my interests converged; my outputs are, in hindsight, plenty self-explanatory. I paired Mariah Carey with Slavoj Žižek and Beyoncé with Chairman Mao because that's what I was listening to and reading at the time. Influenced by one of my best friends at the time, I was engaging with works by the likes of Jasbir Puar and David Eng, and coming into my own as an adult meant questioning everything, from the power that politicians and institutions alike wielded over me to the minutiae of my own everyday decision-making. I felt dissatisfied with the way that life was structured, or how it felt forcibly constrained into a parameter ring-fenced by material necessities—Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" remains evergreen—and so I exercised whatever limited agency I had to play with falsities through a satire of my own making: fake news, but my way.

In the end, I didn't go to law school. Despite all of my preparations, I was disillusioned. I observed, year after year, wide-eyed do-gooders enter law school only to be subsumed into the amorphous entity known as Big Law, because I knew that I too would have been one of them. I witnessed my friends accept Faustian bargains because they wanted to pay rent. I saw in reality, over and over, that it's impossible to reform a system from within. (It's a thought to be expounded another day, but I do firmly believe that the purpose of a system is what it does.) Although I would have benefited from the institutional capabilities afforded to an attorney, I, who once claimed to want to become the nation's first gay and Asian American Supreme Court Justice, no longer wanted to be a lawyer. Life had other plans for me.

[hesperidia]

my experience learning how to gif:

Yesterday i wanted to do a funney post at 1am and i felt it needed a gif, so i Tried to follow this tutorial which is very well explained (linking if someone else would like to try it out??), but instantly encountered issues like:

not having the correct programs to work with (the video downloader and program to take screencaps. i couldn't manage to download versions for windows (maybe i'm just tech illiterate but it really slowed the process)

my version of PS (portable) is very broken and you can't do anything on it without getting error messages and/or freezing my laptop to death

my laptop is a brick. yes this explains a lot

So, i started with downloading the videos using a firefox addon that only let me get 720p (this explains a lot) (i chose enstars mvs for practicing bc they are readily available in youtube)

Then, i used a website to get the screencaps in .png (i've to test if .jpeg looks better? idk enough about different file types). this website also lets you crop videos and that's what i did in my 2nd try, instead of cropping the frames with ps (which freezes my laptop :) ).

The function in ps that lets you import each file as a layer is broken in my program, so i had to manually import them into my art program of choice (sai), arrange and name them one by one. Save that as .psd and opening it again in ps (this is the most time consuming tedious step EVER).

Once i did all that, making the actual gif wasn't that bad. ps timeline is fairly easy to use. HOWEVER i can't convert all the frames into smart objects (i think you have to do that?) to proceed with the editing/sharpening/coloring part as explained in the tutorial. (i had almost an aneurysm last night bc of this bc i kept getting errors and white frames in between) so the three gifs i did were just unedited.

Things i learned:

More frames -> smoother gifs (fork found in kitchen) i tried to gif something with few frames it ended up super crunchy and impossible to time right

Timing is a pain i just set everything to 0,1 and hope for the best

Sharpening does not work well with 3d models (from the es mvs, i tried editing a single frame to see how it'd look and didn't like it, but i should mess around with it more)

Need better programs and a laptop that won't die on me but i'm not going to become a gifmaker, like i said i just needed a gif for a silly post which i could've easily done online but i didn't want to sleep last night ^-^

I don't quite understand how to size gifs yet and the tumblr requirements for them but that's for another day.

Trying to do it with an online version of "photoshop" to see if i can avoid the errors

?????????

that's all idk why i wrote all this. shu jumpscare:

[hxhhasmysoul]

Different anon.

But I found this statement of your in your other post interesting:

“it's long, it's not perfect and replies to very particular statements made by someone i'm actually friends with rn, but it's pretty exhaustive.”

I would have never thought that you two would become friends. I personally won’t have spent a time of day with people like them, since they seem illiterate when it come to consuming media they claimed to love.

writing out all my thoughts using that post as a jumping off point will forever haunt me.

sometimes it turns out that when you talk to people directly you can find out you can communicate fine even if you come from different places.

sometimes people are just too quick in writing stuff out in a rush of emotion and they aren't really good at writing. it's happened to me a lot when i just write out my adhd and it's really nonsense but i'm feeling bad and i post it.

but most importantly i was right about them in the first few paragraphs of what i wrote there. they aren't malicious in their criticism. they aren't a clout chaser, unlike most people who say things like the previous anon, the cookie cutter stuff about the female characters in jjk and how gege is a misogynist. you can kinda sense it in the flavour of emotion in how these statements are made.

this person's, my new tumblr friend's, posts show a deep emotional connection to the text even if they read the text in a biased way and misinterpreted it.

the previous anon's statement shows this gotcha glee, this smugness of winning the internets. but absolutely no connection to the text. it's thoughtlessly repeating the supposedly morally winning theoretically conversation ending statement someone else came up with who knows how long ago. if you're already smelling the rightwing "check mate libs", you're right because this is what it is.

that's why i called their attitude "performative internet leftism". this is how i call it, i've seen "rainbow puritanism" for the more queer laced versions of this, i'm sure there are other names too. it happens when people, who haven't interrogated where their mindsets and value systems come from, engage in shallow leftism without actually doing the work of trying to understand leftist concepts and their implications. and because they were often socialised in very conservative and/or religiously fundamentalist societies they really need the world to divide into good and bad, and everything they engage with has to have a moral value and is also something that they think reflects on them and is a proof as to what kind of person they are.

that's why they can apply things like a feminist lens in a zero sum way. things like feminist theory, race theory, queer theory, gender theory and many other left leaning critical frameworks are tools for analysis and not judgement. they come from the academia and they are to help to understand systems and patterns. but "performative internet leftism" is about positioning yourself as a good person, as a person who's critical aka someone who will think long and hard enough to get to the problematic. and once they find the problematic and establish the moral value of something they can win the internets.

it's also extremely inflexible, that's why that anon completely ignored my reply to their first ask and proceeded to aggressive gender gege while straw manning some opinions.

that's also why the person, whose post i disagreed with yesterday, replied to my disagreement by saying they didn't finish reading what i wrote and calling themself "normal" and contrasting themself that way from me. because that poster established that they are "normal" and i'm not, they felt that it's okay to completely disregard everything i wrote. normal/abnormal or more often normal/degenerate is a very obvious far right way of dividing people and opinions. that person deemed themself a feminist and a leftist and yet they defaulted to a far right dogwhistle but in their mind they might have felt that they won the internets.

that reply of mine, a poorly phrased and emotional reply btw, is actually what prompted that anon.

so i likely wouldn't manage to be friends with anon or the normal poster, because i'm human, how i fail at leftism is that i'm bitter, and i couldn't not look down on them after what i've seen from them.

[hippy-pants]

those tags were a very condensed version of the many thoughts I have on this subject so it's fair that it was misinterpreted, but my point was never that learning computer technology isn't important. I don't believe that.

The main problem I was expressing here was just my irritation with the superiority complex of it all - I think some of the twentysomethings on tumblr who grew up with home computers really like to make themselves feel good about being familiar with 90s and 2000s technology. Posts like this tend to feel like they're just made to gawk at youth, who they think is technologically illiterate. Speaking as someone who grew up with the same tech as those tumblr users, this sentiment is useless and annoying. There are good arguments to be made regarding tech trends in conjunction with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, but to me it feels that, more often than not, their argument is just "wow, kids today spend so much time on their phones. tech literacy is dead." It kind of irritates me, because there are legitimate issues with modern tech trends that I'd like to see talked about rather than millenials bitching about the way that teenagers interact with technology.

However, I kind of have a problem with the argument that is there as well. I don't think tech literacy is, like, crumbling in our hands because of chromebooks. The keyword that I think a lot of people are missing in this conversation is "casual." The average casual computer user favors convenience and simplicity over quality, and this has always been the case. Many millenials would and have embraced smartphone-era technology for the sake of simplicity too. While I think children's computer education is sub-par in general, the way ppl are acting about it is an overreaction. I don't think everyone needs to learn every facet of how a computer works if they aren't going to use it much. And not everyone does use computers much!

As someone who grew up with both computers and smartphones/tablets, I'm familiar with both and they both come with pros and cons. Personally, I greatly prefer my local files and customizability and computer specs, but it's a personal preference. While most of my peers skew toward casual modern tech uses, I must stress that that, in fact, most people are casual users. I've almost never met a young person who can't navigate a desktop PC, but many of them just don't see the point because they have easier methods at their fingertips. This doesn't mean they're tech illiterate iPad babies. It doesn't mean tech literacy is dead.

Oh, and not to mention: computers are expensive. I can say this as someone who grew up relatively poor: being familiar with computers in the modern day is a privilege. In order to be familiar with computers, you need to have grown up with a home computer and had good tech education in elementary school. Fortunately, my school did have good computer classes and I was exposed to them consistently, but at home I made do with a Kindle Fire. I got a smartphone at age 11, but it was a shitty $40 one with 4GB of storage. Meanwhile, I didn't get my own laptop until I bought my own for college. Because it was $1000. Of course casual users would rather spend $200 on a chromebook, but many also straight-up can't have a computer. This is a problem, but it's not their fault they don't understand computers. That adds another layer of irritation I have at tumblr users who like to gawk at people my age and younger for whom home computers are not just culturally inaccessible, but financially.

This isn't to say that I think cloud storage is a good thing, or that it's not important to understand computer technology. But at the same time, I think that if you're legitimately worried that young people are becoming technologically illiterate because they prefer phones over computers, you should ask yourself why you think that. Is it because it's objectively worse in every way, or is it because you personally prefer customizability over convenience and can't conceive of someone who feels differently? How much of this sentiment you feel is born from a subconscious feeling of superiority? And no matter what conclusion you come to about this subject, why do you feel the need to put down non-PC users for not knowing computers? it's weird.

I don't want to imply that this is a good trend. I think that Google and Microsoft and Apple and other giant tech corporations are moving toward smartphones/streaming/cloud storage for the sake of profit. Yknow, phones are made to last no longer than, like, three years. More and more features of our devices are being locked behind subcription services. It sucks. But this is not a problem caused by individual people because they use a chromebook or don't know what a graphics driver is. I won't call tumblr users anti-technology, but I will say that for such a progressive website, a lot of tumblr users are pretty resistant to change. It's, like, a meme that tumblr users hate any new features, but look at the way they've historically treated TikTok, or new users coming from Twitter, or mobile users. This feels the same to me - Tumblr users seem to be mostly in their 20s, and they're pretty resistant to they ways tech has changed... they can dislike it and they can discuss the problems with it, but I find it really irritating when they just go "computer good, phone bad" without thinking about it. At most, it's a disproportionate reaction to something inevitable, and at least, they're just judging children for being younger (and again, sometimes poorer) than them.

TL;DR: tumblr users generally seem to be more self-righteous than actually worried about tech literacy, and casual computer users don't really need to understand computers beyond the level at which they interact with people anyway.

this can't be true can it

[vulturhythm]

Tumblr-illiterate reader de-lurking here. I have been reading your writing for a while and enjoy it so much that I've read even the hurt/no comfort pieces (which says A Lot since I normally skip that genre). But the main reason I'm here today is to say I just saw your post about your cat, and I am so sorry for the loss. Pets become family, and I know how difficult it is to lose them. I hope you are able to find comfort, and I'm sending good thoughts your way.

I’m sorry this has sat unanswered for so long, my darling!! Please forgive me. I just want you to know that your words mean the world to me. I appreciate both your praise and sympathy. <3