#if i don’t pretend like this is “TAKING NOTES LIKE SCHOOL (REAL NOT CLICKBAIT) on 10mph

[striped-soda]

sometimes when i don’t have the motivation for homework i draw dan and arin having little adventures on my notes

[annetteblog]

Intro & My take on KM

Hi!

I’m new around here so it’s supposed to be (not so short) introduction, since I don’t know how to start a blog heh. I hope to sprinkle my 0.5 cents into the KM conversation and maybe to bring a new perspective from someone, who is not a part of the typical English-speaking West.

Who /the hell/ Am I?  

(please, consider it to be said with NJ’s voice from Intro: Persona :D)

I was born in Siberia (it’s in the Asian part of Russia), currently live in the European part of the country while studying at a Uni (European in terms of geography, not in terms of everything else i’m definitely not shading rn lolllll). English is not my first language, I’ve just kind of learnt it to some extent. Due to this it takes me more time to write a post; and I may (and will) make some grammatical & other mistakes. Plus I’m lazy AND busy with Uni, so I won’t even promise to be consistent in posting smth lol. But I thought I need more practice in terms of writing in English, so here I am, actually scribbling something. This feels weird, because I’ve been around stan Tumblr since 2015, but never ever interacted, just read.

How I ended up around Jikook/Kookmin (and BTS) & My (long&messy) take on this matter

Although I had heard of BTS before, I became an Army only in October 2018. I had kinda avoided them, because you know... boybands.... sing songs about romantic love and how they love girls.......... (+I had been around Twitter when 1D been at their peak and I remember a quite toxic community of fans, whom always had scared me). Shortly, hello stereotypes. Obviously, after I got engaged I felt terribly sorry that I had been sleeping on them, but what is done cannot be undone. 

Someone I knew back then reposted one of their MVs and I, during my sad hours of procrastination, decided to watch it. Then I saw their live performance with the same song. And I thought “wow these guys can sing and dance and the music is kinda cool, i need to check this out maybe??” 

Then a funny thing happened. One of the next videos I watched (the same person had it added to their page) was a 2016 BangtanBomb where JM and JK practiced their Coming of Age dance. 

Do you know this moment with Gina from the 1st episode of Brooklyn 9-9:

Well, that was precisely me after I watched it. I don’t even know how to explain this, it was kind of a gut feeling? Whatever you call it, I started to get suspicious and couldn’t even explain to myself why. /actually now a do have questions to this vid and the main one - why does everyone cringe that much? if it’s a girly choreo than they had done some “girly” moves before. why is there such strong reaction??/

I started to get deeper and went to some ru-shipper communities. Shipping culture among Russian speaking fans is... well, weird to some extent, but I maybe address this topic some time later. You need to consider that (as far as you probably know) Russia is quite homophonic country and sadly is not the greatest place for LGBTQ+ community at the moment. The non-frienly influential attitudes hanging in the society + the general shippers’ weirdness = the result is not that nice honestly. 

I struggled for some time in order to find more mature people (not just in terms of age but in general sanity), failed, ended up with some EXTREMELY toxic ru-fans of TK, which was/is the most popular pairing here, spent among them like 15 minutes and ran away horrified. After that I didn’t even try to engage with shippers or believers or whatever of any pair and just decided to enjoy the music and the content (which is a great idea, highly recommend!)

After a couple of days I discovered that JK makes videos. I love video, films and visual art so I immediately found them on YT, saw the titles with names of different cities from all over the world and was like “Oh that must be so cool, he’s visited so many outstanding places I’ve never been to, so I really need to watch it! I shall enjoy some beautyyy”. Then I clicked on GCFt.

Well, what can I say. I did enjoy some beauty, but not the type I had initially anticipated. The biggest clickbait in my entire life. JK should be proud of himself.

                                       /as I said - the beauty/

I had already known Troy back then and I known the song’s lyrics so it would not be an underestimation to say - the video just blew my mind. I was like - hold on is this real? seriously?? no really really????? he manage to get away with something THAT obvious?????? dude how

As a person who edited videos AND is not a native English speaker, I don’t buy the explanation “oh he mustve didnt get the lyrics lmao”. You just don’t do that. You don’t. DON’T. You google and translate every shit you don’t understand, every word and idiom you’ve never encountered, because otherwise the possibility of an epic failure is very likely. You wouldn’t want to give your mum a video as a birthday present and then discover that you used a song with WAP-ish lyrics, right? (well maybe that would be okay in your family, I don’t judge, but that’s not the case for people I know). So don’t you dare to degrade JK’s intellectual capacities; such assumption is really offensive. He is a smart boii, he knows exactly what he’s doing in terms of his art.

So I was shocked, but decided to look for the context - maybe I missed some previous events regarding this Tokyo thing (another great idea - always check the context). Well, apparently I didn’t, because the whole narrative with the trip for two, lovely selfies etc. made my poor brain lowkey explode. (I still don’t buy the rings theory thing though)

But I didn’t give up lol! I’m a bit stubborn and it’s very hard to convince me in anything, so I decided to search for more context, more of their interactions, moreeee. Remember, the late October 2018, there were no swan lakes, RB, and even MMA18 hadn’t happened yet. 

This time I ended up watching content in more or less consistent way, and when I saw all of these scenes with affectionate JM and a cool badass i-don’t-care-about-anyone-i’m-a-manly-man-with-no-feelings-whatsoever JK, I just hysterically laughed. 

Homophobic Russia, remember? I recognized this. Growing up here being LGBT myself, taught me the same type behaviour during my high school days. When a girl I kinda liked but didn’t what to admit it to myself was nice to me or (oh god) flirted with me, I did something similar. It’s like a huge panic mode. Being an introvert doesn’t help either. The funniest thing is that you may not entirely realise what exactly is going on in terms of your own feelings, especially at that age (16-18ish). In my personal case, I thought I liked her but as a friend, only later to realise that well not as a friend oops :DDD The second thing (already not so funny) is that you actually consciously or unconsciously try to avoid the subject as much as possible, as long as possible and pretend that nothing is going on. We’re just bros. Stop doing this stupid gayish thing and don’t look at me like that, you’re annoying. If you ever do this again I (gently) kick you. I’m straighter than a straight line in my math textbook. IDK, but probably that’s your brain is somehow trying to protect you. Again, in my case&position I knew that the consequences for any non-straight person being outed would be bad (TW not to the point of being killed bad, but to the point of being excluded from a big part of society). So for me it was a mixture of the internalized homophobia + lack of self reflection + just being a bit emotionally slow + very! straight community around. Shit happens, I was a teenager and made my share of mistakes, but that experience helps me to recognize the same pattern of behaviour up to this day.   

So coming back to KM, because the post is already waaay too long and I just ramble. It’s been 2+ years for me being a part of this fandom, and what can I say... Things become more intense and eventful with every year passing by ;) Funny how I felt that vibe from the 2016 dance practice video. Seeing the Black Swan performance a week ago almost had me choked, no joking. They are amazing.

                                                    Pure Art

However, and I would like to emphasize that, I do not incline that KM are 100% romantically involved and/or gay or whatever. I tend to treat people with respect and not to make too much assumptions about their private life. That’s not my business. However, I’m also not a fan of heteronormativity, so I’m just sitting here and observe everything that’s going on putting some distance and not forgetting being generally polite and critical thinking. But if they are just straightest besties please give them an Oscar before Grammy

Anyways, I hope this blog won’t kick the bucket from the very start and I will post something every now and then. You can always ask me questions about some BTS/Jikook related stuff or something about Russia and a Russian view on mass culture topics, since I’m pretty sure some of you have very stereotypical view of what is going on here :) However, do note that I’ve never been to America or Europe, therefore I may not be aware of something verrrry obvious to you or just have a completely different experience. 

P.S.  And yeah, I’m used to say Jikook, since it’s the name which is used much more frequently in Russian.  i like it better and what will u do haha

[textualdeviance]

Re: that last reblog about false neutrality: YES. Balance is bias. Facts always lean toward one side or another, and any news org pretending otherwise is gaslighting you. 

My J school taught exactly that principle, thank goodness. Unfortunately, a lot of reporters--particularly in TV news--don’t have journo backgrounds that include this kind of training, nor have they had proper training in copy editing and fact checking. Way too many of them are just talking heads with a generic communications degree, if that. Used to be everyone in news had either a J degree or rigorous training, but once the big corps with their profit-driven agendas started swallowing up local radio and newspapers and running big cable news nets, journalistic integrity got thrown out the window in favor of the 1980s version of clickbait.

Because these supposed reporters are not fully educated, it’s assumed that they don’t have the skill and wisdom to make a judgment call about what facts are and who is most able to provide them. Thus the practice of getting quotes from all sides of a story, and then laying them out with (supposedly) equal weight, and letting the audience decide who’s right. Problem is: The audience mostly isn’t qualified to make those judgments, either, plus they look up to reporters as people who know more than they do, and thus they expect that the news will reliably tell them the truth. So if some jackass on Fox includes quotes from a Flat Earther in every story about NASA, they assume that reporter is telling them that the Flat Earth Society is every bit as qualified to tell the truth about Mars as an astrophysicist from the JPL. Adding confusion: The editorial and “debate” segments/shows that don’t frame themselves as different from straight news reporting. Used to be people knew that commentary and opinion pages weren’t the same thing as reported news. Now no-one has any damned idea what’s actual news and what’s just someone bloviating or a couple of people yelling at each other for the WWE version of reporting. After about 30 years of this, millions of people are no longer able to determine who’s a properly qualified expert and who’s completely full of shit, and an entire generation of news consumers has no fucking idea what’s real and what’s not.

Fast forward to the intarweebs age, and now news has been fully democratized. In many ways, this is a good thing. If everyone has access to a wide-distribution platform, it’s harder for gatekeepers with bad agendas to suppress a story that makes someone in power look bad. (This is part of why people who love propaganda want to kill net neutrality--if you can make it impossible for the plebes to load the pages with real news, it’s easier to control that flow.) Unfortunately, this also means that every dipshit with an axe to grind can call themselves a reporter and insist that their stories be taken just as seriously as ones from actual journalists. See Alex Jones. See Breitbart. See Young Turks. See U.S. Uncut. See the myriad sites run by homeopaths and other “natural” scammers passing off anti-science woo barf as legitimate information. Bald-faced lies are now being framed as fact, and far too many people have absolutely no clue they’re being lied to.

So how do we fix this? Well, it’s actually pretty easy:

1. Support your local newspapers and public radio.

As long as your local paper isn’t run by a massive conglomerate like NewsCorp or Gannett, chances are good it’s doing some decent reporting. If your local big metro paper is shit, look for ones from smaller cities nearby. Many of the weeklies are doing pretty good, too--even the ones that are part of the Village Voice parent company. Figure out who owns it, who the EiC is and what their background is, and then pay especially close attention to stories written by staff reporters (rather than wire services, freelancers, or stringers.)

Subscribe, if you can, or at least pay for a paper copy. If you prefer to get your news in digital form, turn off ad blockers when you go visit the paper’s site, so they can keep making enough money to pay their reporters and editors.

Any local radio that’s affiliated with NPR is probably a good bet, too, especially ones run by colleges. Donate to them if you can. Ignore virtually all talk radio. It’s an absolute cesspool these days.

2. Support the best of the national/international news orgs.

While they do have a slight liberal lean these days, the WaPo is one of the best national-news sources out there. I’d trust them over almost anyone else, including the NYT. For now, NPR is a close second, but whether that lasts depends on how much Trump fucks with it. For wire stories, take anything by the AP with a grain of salt, and pay closer attention to anything from Reuters, the BBC and Al-Jazeera. Many international papers also have good reporting. If you can read another language, look for stories from Der Spiegel, Le Monde, etc. If you’re looking at the U.K., be aware that they have some absolute shit there--ignore anything from the Sun, the Daily Mail or the Telegraph--but they have some good ones, too. The Guardian is particularly reliable. In Canada, the Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun are pretty good.

Some magazines are also good, and because of their longer lead times, you can often get far more in-depth reporting than the constant flow of glorified headlines you see elsewhere. Many of these have a strong East Coast flavor/bias, so keep that in mind, but for the most part, stuff from the Atlantic or the New Yorker is reliable. Ignore the big weeklies, though: Time, Newsweek, etc. They’re every bit as useless as anything else you’d find in a dentist’s waiting room.

3. Ditch ANYTHING that doesn’t do its own reporting, or doesn’t pay reporters.

News aggregators are the scourge of journalism. If the site you’re on is simply repackaging or doing commentary on stories that someone else reported, stop going there. This doesn’t include blogs or other places that are specifically designed for doing news commentary--and are upfront about that--more just the places that link to someone else’s story in the first graf, then have three more grafs paraphrasing or spinning what was in that story, and calling it reporting. That is not reporting. At all. If the person on the byline didn’t actually talk to any of the sources in the story, it’s not real news. It’s clickbait.

Likewise, some places may have a bit of original reporting, but because they don’t pay their freelancers, they should be ignored. HuffPo is particularly bad about this. They’ve even gone so far as to try to justify this by saying that paying their writers would introduce bias. HOLY CRAP NO.

4. Do your own leg work.

The ramp-up for this can be painful, but it pays off down the road. When trying to decide whether a given news org is worth your time, do some research on it. Find out who owns it, how long it’s been around, etc. Get some background on the EiC. Read some of its editorials to get a feel for where they lean. Look at some of its staff-written stories and see who they use for sources and how they frame quotes. See if they follow up any dodgy quotes with other sources refuting those. If a source seems questionable to you, go look them up, too. Could be that the head of Scientists for a Better World is actually some anti-vax crank who lost his medical license and is now operating a cult out of a strip mall. Some of the worst groups out there have names that sound legit--they do that on purpose to sow confusion. Make note of the icky ones, and avoid any news orgs that use them as sources. Also, see how often they run stories that read like slightly edited press releases. If they’re way too excited about some company or product or person, they may have literally just copypasted from docs they got sent by some PR hack. While press releases are useful for getting quotes or initial information, they have to be followed with real reporting.

Also: Don’t rely on your friends or family to give you reliable news (unless they happen to be journalists!) I’m sure Aunt Sadie is a wonderful person and means well, but if she insists that the article she read about how vaccines are dangerous is the gospel truth, chances are good you shouldn’t trust most of what she says about other news. There are a fuckton of well-meaning-but-misinformed people out there, and while they may be good sources for news about your cousin’s graduation, they shouldn’t be relied on to tell you a damned thing about what’s going on in Syria or whether the county water board has been taken over by corporate stooges.

(This caveat includes me, BTW. If all this seems like horseshit to you, feel free to look me up, too. I don’t expect my words to be taken on face value, and I’m happy to be transparent about my background and perspective.)

After a few weeks of doing this kind of investigative digging, you should be able to determine which of your potential news sources is going to be the most reliable, and you can then follow them on Twitter or FB or--gasp!--even buy their dead-tree editions if they have them, and rest assured that what gets in your face is going to be good information. Try to have at least two or three that you regularly follow. Getting a variety of angles is always a good thing, and some places are especially good for one subject or region, but not necessarily useful for other things.

The only way we get better, more reliable news is to pay for what’s already good, and stop giving money and clicks to the bad stuff. All news has to rely on revenue these days, so money alone doesn’t make a news source bad, but if you dry up the cash flow for the shitty stuff and start dumping it on the good stuff, we can eventually get news media back on track. To get good news, you have to be a good news consumer. Working for responsible journalism is a job for all of us.

[garudabluffs]

  The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism  Lip service to the crucial function of the 4th Estate is not enough to sustain it. READ MORE  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/the-mark-zuckerberg-manifesto-is-a-blueprint-for-destroying-journalism/517113/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

Feb 17, 2017 460 comments

“ newsblok.net is a great place to look for news from a variety of sources. “

longform.org

“ America already gives unearned income (from capital) a huge advantage over earned income (from labor). Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income, yet the richest 1 percent of Americans take in 75 percent of all capital gains. Only the wealthiest 0.04 percent of families owe any estate tax upon death. And Social Security taxes aren't levied on income from capital – interest and dividends.Yet Trump and the Republicans are aiming to go even further. They want to eliminate the estate tax, eliminate all taxes on capital gains, and eliminate all taxes on interest and dividends. It will be the biggest tax giveaway to the rich in history.Leaving Social Security and Medicare sitting ducks for benefit cuts.Trump isn’t helping American workers. He’s shafting them, bigly.”

“ One obvious step would be for Facebook, who rakes in advertising dollars, to pay their content providers, also known as journalists.  A system could be devised, for instance, based on the number of shares an article receives (consumers replace the editors, but at least the journalists get paid).  But, of course, Facebook has no incentive to pay for something they can get for free any more than the consumer wants to pay for what they now get for free.  As previously noted, it is yet another failure of the capitalist system.”

“I'm sorry, but I don't need a bunch of amateur pretend journalists being paid on the basis of their 'shares.'  I know it's become unfashionable to defend Journalism-  but it is an art and a skill that involves research, field work, writing, fact-checking and editorial oversight.   All media have bias because all humans have bias.  The best Journalism does its best to 'walk the line,' but will inevitably have failures.   Journalists also develop sources and connections...  that's why the citizens of this country learn as much as they do about what is happening at the local, state and national levels within their governments.  Good Journalism is, ultimately, the only thing standing between any nation and dictatorship.  Yes, it's an adjustment to have to pay for something that used to be 'free,' but there really are sources of legit Journalism that are free-  and for good reason.  Too many people are confusing news aggregators with Journalism. “

“  I disagree with your assertion that a subscription service is the only way of paying for it.  For many years now, advertising has paid for much of the news you're exposed to.  The problem isn't that that revenue stream has disappeared.  The problem is that the revenue isn't flowing through aggregators like Facebook to those who produce the content.”

“CNN is mentioned as getting 3m viewers.BBC News gets 350m, making it bigger than all US news stations combined, but is not mentioned. News journalism is fine.http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacent...“

“If you think that things are getting worse, this is why..."Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.”     --  George Carlin

““For keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”Righteo.. Well first up, Facebook does not, in my opinion, provide that now, it has never provided that mission statement and I could not be more doubtful about its ability to provide it in the future.        Facebook doesn't keep us safe. Facebook provides a medium wherein random people from all over the world post hysterical rumours, opinions, outright lies and third hand information that gets eagerly forwarded on by other random people.        Facebook does not inform us. Facebook provides a medium as to which is utilized by random people from all over the world who post rants, comments and panicked fears based on information they have seen, from an unreliable Mainstream Media and an unreliable Alternative Media and from clickbait sites, and other sites online that post more information that feeds whatever agenda they are promoting.    Facebook does not provide civic engagement.      For Pete's sake. If your idea of civic engagement is liking a picture of a baby posted by your friend you never see anymore, or commenting on a political rant posted by someone in your friends list who you would never spend 5 minutes of real time with etc etc - then sure, Facebook is all about 'providing' civic engagement. The reality is, all it does and all it has ever done, is provide a medium for people to flaunt their narcissism, shriek their fears and bit ch and gossip about other people. None of that is civic engagement in my opinion.

+ Facebook does not provide inclusion for all. When there are apparently 1.9 billion users on a planet with well over 7 billion inhabitants, Facebook users suddenly become an endangered species. And while its fine to count memberships - perhaps its smarter to count ACTIVE users, because from dummy accounts to fake accounts to dead accounts etc etc, the number of active users will be significantly lower than that, I would think.

Plus, this so-called inclusion in the context that this nutcase is actually referring to, only means people who follow the specific political and ideological agenda that one Mark Zuckerberg has. He has no intention of being inclusive to anyone outside of his set of opinions, as he has proven, such as with the Merkel conversation. So, inclusion is fine - as long as you agree and fall in line with the cult of Zuckerberg. No thanks, I will pass on that, myself.

The Media also, only has itself to blame. I have almost zero sympathy for journalism when journalism stopped even paying lip service to the notion of journalistic integrity and objectivity. Media, whether Mainstream or Alternative became nothing more than Opinion, quite a long time ago. If I want to read Opinion, there are a trillion places to go for it. I would pay top dollar - and I would be happy to break the 24 hour news cycle and wait for actual news - even if it meant waiting til the newspaper delivered in the morning, if I could trust that the news printed there, was accurate, honest, objective and without bias. And I think the Media would find that a lot of people would do the same. There's a niche to be filled.

The very idea of a President Zuckerberg scares me as badly as the thought of a President Trump to the most fervent Clinton supporter. This nutcase should not ever be anywhere near the POTUS seat, for all our sakes, irrespective of which side of the political coin you sit on.”

“Begin rant The reason journalism is dying and will die eventually is that the news business is fundamentally fragmented, with news organizations duplicating their workforce chasing the same customers, entrenched in a destructive competition against each other.The net result is a multitude of news *boutiques*, way too small to make investigative journalism economically viable, entangled in a 'lowest bidder rush', not holding accountable the political parties they support in the hope to benefit from their favors when their candidate come to power.In fine, international (and probably domestic) news articles are subcontracted to some remote agencies, with freelancers payed a dime, and a kick in the ass, who have little choice other than recycling the same music on a different tone just to pay their bills. On the left, everyone plays the same instrument. And it's boring, out of touch, predictable.It's a shame that liberal journalists got ran over by the Trump train, while every indicator would have told them something was going on, had they paid attention. But no, they were too busy holding hands, singing kumbaya for the candidate their party told them to.There's a lot to say about Breitbart news, but at least, they figured out the right approach: "F****k Zuck, I'm taking the contrarian route"                   .End rant.”

“ At the grassroots level, what Zuckerberg is talking about is already happening. The Marin Post, founded in June of 2015, is the first all citizen journalist news magazine in California. Build by two people and without a dollar of marketing funds, it has reached 29,000 readers in its short existence and has 84 active citizen journalists. However what has been learned is that without moderation (which is editing stories - is needed - after they are published rather than before), any online community quickly tends to devolve into eight graders yelling insults at each other.... this comment engine, DISQUS, is a case in point. In fact, one of the reasons the Marin Post was created was because neither Facebook nor Nextdoor or other forums led by the so-called wisdom of the crowds provided any place for someone wanting to contribute substantive work. And traditional newspapers, which in many ways deserve the fate they are experiencing, refused to print facts that were politically incorrect or inconvenient. Journalism and investigate reporting may be able to be done by citizen journalists, but it needs to be nurtured and encouraged, and I'm not sure unmoderated content can ever achieve that because the truth is not always the loudest voice in the room.”

“When the Internet was first commercialized, every ISP paid for a connection to  "the backbone" which provided connectivity to other ISP's.  However, content providers were eager to improve connectivity more rapidly than consumers, so they invested in new networks to bypass the backbones and deliver data directly to the consumer ISP's, in many cases paying the consumer ISP's to accept this additional data volume.   This gave them an advantage over competing content providers routing traffic over the general purpose backbones.  If we had "network neutrality" regulations in effect at that time, this would not have been allowed.  Content provider ISP's would not have been able to increase the capacity of their connections to the backbone until consumer ISP's were willing to spend the money to increase the capacity of theirs, and the Internet would still be running at dial-up speeds.The network neutrality crowd seem to view "The Internet" as a place, like a library or like AOL.  It is not.  It is a transportation service that should work like any other transportation service.  A shipper pays to have a parcel delivered, and then recovers that cost however they choose.   Nothing should block a shipping company from offering higher quality service for a higher price.  That is how service improves.The Net Neutrality concept says that only the residential consumer should be allowed to pay for the cost of the last mile network.  It is amazing that the content industry has convinced consumers to support this idea. Or, really, I guess it is not amazing at all, since they are generating all the content that shapes consumer opinion.“ << I suspect your post is going to go over the heads of most everyone who reads it, but this is a really good idea.>>