#internet culture has changed so much i don't think it will ever be possible to go back but sometimes i miss those days so much

[alwayshappyhoursomewhere]

#remember how most LJ culture occurred in the comments?

Remember how LiveJournal let you have several icons (or avatars or "pfps" as you might call them now)? And you'd carefully choose an icon to fit the subject matter, your tone, and the blog on which you were commenting or posting?

And it could make your argument look that much snarkier if you used a rude one? Or you could use it to add a multiplier to a joke?

And icons, alongside banners and wallpapers, were a whole genre of fanwork with its own design language, conventions, and norms, including carefully crediting people for them?

That was neat.

[hillbillyoracle]

You Should Get A Radio

I want to convince you to get a radio. It can be a pretty cheap one - you can sometimes thrift them even - just something to listen to the music and shows that are literally streaming completely for free all around you right this very moment.

Libraries get a lot of love - deservedly so. They are such a frugal resource for entertainment and the community at large. I would argue that radio is very similar.

Find New Music

Radio can introduce you to music you never would have run across otherwise. Spotify and the like have a goal of getting you to listen for as long as possible. This incentivizes the alorgithm picking your music recs to stay very safely within your known listening profile. But since a radio station is broadcasting to a large number of people, not you individually, you're more likely to run into music you personally wouldn't have picked but actually enjoy.

Not to mention that if you're in the US at least, you're very likely within range of a public broadcasting station which not only has local and national news, but various music shows as well - World Cafe is a treasure. College radio stations, if you have one nearby by, can be hit or miss, but in general, it is a great way to find local and very niche music you wouldn't hear played anywhere else. If you're in a city, you very likely have a couple of hyperlocal low power FM stations - many who serve communities who don't speak English and who have their own unique music programming. I also enjoy a lot of the adult contemporary and "oldies" stations I can get near me.

The Ads Aren't Targeted

On most stations, you'll hear some ads. Some stations you'll hear more than a few. But none of those ads are based on an ever growing mass of information being collected about you and your listening habits to decide what specific ad you're most likely to actually act on. They're just...an ad. When you turn it off, it can't follow you around until you actually buy it.

Also, if you're listening to local stations, a lot of the ads are for local businesses in your community; places owned by your neighbors and the people you live with. For me, it's been a nice way to be reminded of what places exist in my community since I usually go to my regular haunts and nothing else.

Frugal and Fun

Radios can be pretty cheap. I see them in thrift stores pretty regularly around here and you might be able to try Marketplace for one. Mine was a birthday gift and I paid a little more to upgrade the antena later. Mine uses rechargeable batteries but I think they make ones that are just straight up rechargeable now.

Since I can't control the music, I'm not turning to it to skip through music or pick a different playlist or look up a given artist I want to hear because I just remembered they existed. I'm more present, whether I'm just listening to the show or pairing it with something else (recently it's been knitting or solitaire games).

Similar to the way that libraries can be one way you decrease your reliance on subscription culture, radio is another. Especially for public broadcasting stations, the programming is always changing, there are new shows every week, and there are often ways for you to get involved. It's another form of entertainment that often gets overlooked.

It's Screen Free

Not much to say here. It's just a big plus to me. I'm trying to take more breaks from screens and make the time I do spend on screens less addictive. I like that I can throw on a radio station and listen to a show without ever having to resist the urge to check email or something.

Vital in Emergencies

Have you thought of how you'd get information during an emergency if the internet goes out? Radio is a great option and still regularly saves lives. In the event of emergencies, local radio stations are often some of the very first people to get information on where shelters are being set up, where resoruces are being distributed, and how to stay safe through the course of the event. Depending on the event, emergency managers will actually bring in radio equipment to keep broadcasting going if there's been damage to a tower and even set up temporary/mobile station up to get the word out if there's not a local station they can partner with.

On days when the weather isn't looking so great, I often have the weather band radio turned on so I can get the latest NWS forecasts and hear when a watch is issued - phones usually only get warnings unless you go out of your way to sign up for more. And out where I live, I usually don't even get those since cell signal is spotty.

It's a great investment in your safety that you can also enjoy whenever.

Conclusion

Buy a radio. Especially if you're looking to get away from subscriptions and cut costs. You can own your radio - you can't own Spotify. It's also just something I think everyone should have since it's such a vital resource in emergencies.

ETA: I am a young millinial. I grew up with radio and remember a time before the internet so I'm not saying any of this as if I'm discovering it. It's more I've been not only enjoying it a lot lately but reminded that a lot of people aren't aware of everything it offers so I wanted to share that in case it was news to anyone.

[velvetvexations]

It is so unbelievable how many fucking anti transmasc losers there are!! It's unbelievable, it really is just like ace discourse. Every fucking blog, I have to search 'transmasc' and 'TME' just like I had to search 'ace' and 'asexual' back in the day People will JUMP at the chance to do this shit over again huh

You should read up on the Cultural Revolution because it just keeps happening.

Ok not to double send but...

Blogs like yours do WONDERS for my mental health. Knowing there are actually people in my corner while I realise I'm a trans man is phenomenal

I'm glad to help! <3

my passing status is nebulous. sometimes i pass, but mostly i dont. im a trans guy with a thing for crossdressing so sometimes i have actual, legitimate euphoria vibes over just... sitting in my car and looking feminine. like "you all think im a girl but SECRETLY IM A BOY!!!" and it feels really good because like. yeah. i can look like a girl but nothing will change that i am a boy 😊😊 trans guy crossdresser again, my passing status is also really weird because i am intersex. my mustache confuses people, and that's great

That's similar to how I feel. People think I'm misgendering myself when I call myself male but it's more like I'm asserting dominance over gendered expectations lol. I'm male and I'm still a woman anyway.

thank you for your blog. a musician i really respected went super anti-transmasc recently and its really hurt, and the stuff here makes me feel like. less insane for having an issue with it

I'm really, really sorry anon. I love you a lot. <3

love that this person is calling people who believe that trans men can be oppressed "chuds", a word that is mostly used to talk about right-wing conservative men

transandro reactionaries dontcha know

"internet tough guys" still exist in 2024?????????????

Someone said something like "no one wants to fight you" and I was thinking "no actually I'm dead serious I would actually."

anyone who tries to debunk transandrophobia by throwing in "you people" has automatically lost the argument imo. but also I need to rant. as That Guy in your inbox who hangs out in bear and leather bars it makes me genuinely want to chew through the floor when people are like "oh well queer people don't demonize masculinity" GO OUTSIDE. YES THEY DO. there is a REASON fat hairy balding men tend to have our own damn spaces, because no one else will take us. FUCK.

if people want to insist that everyone around them has always recognized their soul-gender and no one is ever treated like anything but what they identify as maybe they should stop talking about what genders that aren't theirs experience

I'm a bisexual trans man who does not pass and never will pass and I have spent over 30 years of my life being told my experiences aren't real mostly by other queer people and I am so, so, so, so, SO jaded by it. I'm done. If you tell me "your lived experiences are not a real thing" then you're the villain. I can't stand it. I genuinely cannot take it anymore. I have absolutely nowhere to go and I feel so unbelievably hopeless.

Try to hang in there anon. It's okay to disengage and avoid discourse. I know it's not always possible, but there's nothing wrong with unplugging from this shit as much as you can. You have to focus on your happiness.

I love you. <3

[stupidstupidratcreatures]

caught up with what happens next. thoughts mostly about the comment section under the cut sorry

1. it's always been really interesting to me just how abstract a depiction of a person can be and still have people that find that depiction hot. i check the comments because i'm a dipshit and there are pretty consistently 2-3 people under any vikki or gage panel there for that. also shoutout to that one "when vicki's done resting her head on her mom's lap can i have a turn" comment

2. there's a lot of speculation-presented-as-fact about 202X griffin in the comments and it all feels like stuff we kinda can't know? we've only ever seen him post-murder in that photo with gage and we haven't seen current griffin "in person" at all. this isn't normally something i would care about or disagree with but it doesn't seem like what current griffin is actually like as a person is relevant at all to the role he's playing in the story right now

3. hm it's like very possible that in-fiction named himself after the mcelroy brother huh. what year would it have been like 2014? scary stuff

4. there are like a pretty large number of people ripping on milo in the comment section also. that feels weird. i get disliking That Type Of Guy but he was made to cut up his dead friend with a saw and then also institutionalized for five years. can we be nice

5. i feel like there's stuff here that shows this comic's age even in the three years since it started. gage is less of an extant guyotype than he used to be (as in the cultural signifiers and the true crime/serial killing obsession. "poor and isolated trans guy who talks to people online" is not someone going away so long as poverty, transmasculinity, and the internet exist). vikki says "because of woke" in a panel that's meant to be part of the same scene as the very first page and that definitely isn't something they were saying in 2021. the look of the tumblr ui, that thing max graves draws a lot, has changed drastically since the comic started. i don't mean this in a cinemasins way i just mean this like. idk. the way time moves so much faster than any webcomic updating schedule does is just something that i think about and this comic gives me a lot of occasion to think about it. it's very good

[terrence-silver]

Random Concept: Terry Silver with a TikTok-obsessed Beloved

It would be cute if beloved wanted to film cute couple moments with Terry.

Spicier with Terry during the Halloween season because of all the Ghostface masks trending.

I can imagine Gen Z beloved doing something like the Gothic Baby account if they have a kids with Terry.

Like, I do think Terry Silver, in his old age majorly keeps up with trends.

He always has.

He always had his finger on the pulse of the 'brand new thing'.

More so than young people, undoubtedly --- he's a businessman, after all.

He's too clever not to keep up. That's how he can blend in so perfectly and adapt if need be, being chameleonic in nature, changing and transforming with the times. It's how he can manipulate perceptions and cultural norms --- by being in touch with things around him, sure, like the advent of social media. The Online sphere. Being Vegan for a while, because that's a la mode and acceptable in a more Liberal, upper crust crowd in Los Angeles --- it's admirable, even. A societal badge that says one's a conscientious, good person (And Terry Silver's just that? Right?) when that wouldn't have been the case in the past. Thirty years ago it was perhaps the discourse between nuclear and fossil fuels or green new energy that mattered, and today, it's all about Tik Tok. It's Twitter. Or X, rather. And what's trending on there --- the type of stuff that can make or break one's reputation because someone said something stupid or cancel-worthy two decades ago. Heck, even the branding of social media itself changes, having one name and taking on another practically overnight! The world moves fast and Terry Silver moves with it. But, in spite of him been keenly aware what's what and what it means, I envision his Online presence is incredibly scarce and unbelievably curated on purpose and what information can be found on him on the Internet has been fine combed and is continuously fine combed so really, not only can you not find anything too controversial about him on there (maybe just the right amount of controversial, tactically speaking; acceptable controversies, as to not make him seem too inhumanly saintly and by extension, unrealistic, too suspicious and fake) --- you can't even really find anything much of anything in general except what Terry deliberately and specifically wants on there. Man's incredibly private all while putting up a facade that he's an open book --- which, don't be fooled, he's anything but.

What I mean to say with this is that Terry Silver undoubtedly wouldn't be on Twitter, for example, posting his actual, real opinions about...anything. He's smart like that.

So, any beloved of his? Gen Z or otherwise?

Chances are, they wouldn't be chronically Online either.

They wouldn't be on Tik Tok, plastering videos of themselves, their family or Terry Silver himself for the world to see consistently, because the thought of thousands of people (Voyeurs, the way an already voyeuristic Terry would see it) tuning in to see and watch his beloved --- random punks commenting on them, expressing their opinions willy-nilly, judge, complementing them, leering, passing, bookmarking, downloading and sharing said clips around unstoppably, without any monitoring as to how they could use and abuse such material...legitimately forever --- well, it presses the button of someone fiercely territorial, jealous, possessive, protective and control oriented like Terry. He doesn't like it. He doesn't allow it. He thinks it's bullshit. He would take advantage of someone's else's uploads Online for sure, if push ever came to shove, so maybe it is a bit of projection on his behalf, that somehow, someone, somewhere, would do the same to him and someone who belongs to him to weaken him or retaliate against him, so to take precaution against it, beloved's presence Online becomes, possibly, even scarcer than his, because they're the most precious thing he has and when something or someone's precious or valuable, they're tucked away. Hidden, in ways. Plus side to this, though --- I can envision Terry Silver, like a man who was young in the 70's and 80's being big on home videos instead. Private collections for his private viewing pleasure and usage only. Cute couple moments galore are permissible --- everything is permissible, in fact --- but these recordings, lets call them, belong and remain explicitly in Terry Silver's private care, because he's a man who doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve and tends to strategically tuck away everything that ever mattered to him. Everything that makes him vulnerable. Everything that can compromise or damage him. Most of everything he really is from the public. Includes beloved. Whatever children he might or might not have with them.

If someone was somehow skillful enough to discover their names and Google them, chances are, nothing specific comes up in their search results. Not anywhere.

That's deliberate.

[catbountry]

This is the third time I am writing this post because I feel like the idea I'm trying to convey keeps slipping away from me as I keep piling on context, and really, all it is... is just making excuses. I held transmed beliefs and questioned the validity of nonbinary gender identities back on Kiwi Farms. Now, I feel like if circumstances were slightly different, I probably would identify as enby.

Honestly.

The only reason I don't is because my feelings towards being a woman are pretty neutral. All of my problems I had in regards to gender growing up was not so much being a girl, but being constantly told by other girls and older women that I was being a girl wrong. Being a woman is perfectly fine with me; it's the sexism and policing of what is acceptable gender expression I have a problem with.

I don't think I can fully identify as queer, even though most of my friends are and I feel like they get me, so I feel perfectly at home. At the end of the day, I am fine with being a woman, and I am exclusively attracted to men. And I hate to say it, but it's cis men and maybe AMAB enbies who are okay with presenting more masculine. I just really, really like dicks. I don't really like vaginas, even though I imagine most people who would look at me and how I dress myself would assume that I am. And I know this, because I have been called homophobic slurs in public.

Is simply being gender nonconforming enough to be queer? I'm not sure, because I don't know if I'd ever be in a relationship that would be in danger because of legislation being passed. I could, however, see myself getting shit for my gender presentation, because I get people trying to clock me as either a trans man at the start of their transition or genderqueer. I'm in a pretty blue state, in a college town, surrounded by a lot of people younger than me who are overall much more accepting than I had been at their age, though, so realistically, I'm probably not in danger of being targeted for possibly being queer. Would that make me queer adjacent, though? I don't fucking know, but at the same time... I feel at home hanging around a bunch of queer folks. One of my friends joked that I'm straight, but I'm pretty gay about it. There are a lot of times where I will feel like one of the only cishet people in a group. Maybe it's because I've refused to give up the general subculture aesthetic and have been wearing graphic tees, ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors since high school, and I'm not going to stop anytime soon. I still get mistaken for being in my 20's so I am going to ride that shit into the ground, baby.

Things have changed a lot. Culture has changed. The internet has changed. I've changed. Everybody's on the goddamn internet now, including a lot of people who seem utterly clueless about its culture and history. I don't have anybody in my circles of friends that would ever identify as "anti-SJW" anymore. There is no debate in any of the circles I'm in on the validity of trans people at all, or nonbinary people. I look to those who I might have either associated with loosely or engaged with their content, and they just seem like they spiraled into increasing extremism, and for many of them, it doesn't seem like it's just to keep the grift going. They're true believers. And a part of me finds it kind of sad, actually, because they're going to just be miserable fucks for the rest of their lives if they keep their current trajectory. The momentum of the trans rights movement is not going to stop. Normies are getting sick of politicians focusing on transgender people. And within the trans community itself, the infighting has pretty much stopped because of just how tight the screws are being turned as conservatives go all out on the last socially acceptable group they can go against. They're being much more blatant about their bigotry in a way that's so flagrant, it would have been unthinkable ten years ago. We've got bigger problems.

Why am I even writing all of this out? I don't know. It's not like these posts are going to show up on Google when people look me up and see "callout" after my username in the suggestions. But it's important to me to map out these thoughts, I suppose, because actually changing means a lot more than grovelling and saying sorry to be accepted by people who wouldn't be willing to hear me out in the first place. I don't even think I fully regret being on Kiwi Farms; I more regret sticking around as long as I did, and if you've been paying attention to me posting about major life events I've been dealing with recently, you may have noticed I kind of have a problem with sticking around toxic people or places out of some misplaced sense of loyalty.

I guess I'm just stubborn.

TL;DR I feel pretty bad about not believing nonbinary identities weren't valid because I feel like I almost kind of sort of feel that? Also trans rights forever and ever,

[nifilmgirly]

My First Film Job😊

Welcome to my first post...Its all a bit cringe, but as I'm currently unemployed again I thought I would speak about how I got to where I am now.

Starting way back at the beginning, my A-Levels, which were four years ago now... crazy... I studied Performance Art, Moving Image Arts, Politics and Government and finally History. I have always been very interested in film and was massively influenced in my taste by my dad. A staple of my childhood was watching movies with my dad, which at times was questionable, see examples such as; watching Forest Gump aged eleven and not understanding any cultural references, watching pulp fiction and that.... scene and also getting far too much enjoyment out of a good shitty apocalypse sci-fi.

Truly my fascination started when I was studying for my Moving Image Arts A-Level. This was a film studies subject and to go beyond the level of active viewer to being given the tools to analyse and think more deeply about how and why these movies were created was revelatory [pardon the dramatics]. I found myself unable to watch media anymore without thinking about the techniques that were used, why they were used and how they made me or were supposed to make me feel. I think this was the first time i considered genuinely pursuing a career in film and performance. Whilst it was always something I was passionate about I thought I had to study something more ''serious'' or attainable, which now I can look back at and laugh. People will always tell you that you won't be good enough, whether that be your peers or your careers advisor, but if you're passionate then I would say go for it... I did.

Time jump now, I went to University of Bristol to study theatre and film. Firstly, moving to England during the covid era was a... choice. I wouldn't change it for the world now but that is not to say that it wasn't extremely difficult. I thoroughly enjoyed my three years of study[and working my ass of in a pub to pay my rent] but have since moved back to Northern Ireland. The industry here is thriving and more and more projects are popping up all over the place.

Which brings me to... MY FIRST FILM JOB. I managed to wrangle my way on to the set of How To Train Your Dragon live action, which was being shot in Belfast.[ Shooting has since wrapped]. Look, trying to get into this industry is all about who you know... and I don't know anyone, therefore some serious grafting was in order. The level of stalking I did here is slightly psycho, however it paid off, so, we can ignore the unhingedness.

I loveeee the HTTYD series and because of this follow the director, Dean on instagram. He posted about shooting in Belfast and I took notice, the way I was scouring the internet for job postings about this project was obsessive. I knew where they were shooting and that it was starting in January but not much else. I half considered just appearing on the set and asking if I could help them out for free. However, through reddit posts and a fortunate coincidence of a sister of a friends flat mates uncle [girl...] working on the building the set, I finally found a job opening for a [drumroll] barista. So, not exactly what i wanted to do but with about 5 years of hospitality experience behind me I thought, fuck it, a wins a win.

So, I was in, I worked on this set from the start of January until they wrapped last week. I can not speak highly enough of my time on the catering side of film production. It has given me a real insight as to how a set works and just how many cogs are turning to make it work. This crew were some of the most lovely people I have ever worked with and from watching the way the set works it has definitely cemented to me that I want to work in this world. Through this experience I have met numerous new people involved in production and learnt about what exactly it is that they do.[yay for organic nepotism win]. I have also heard insights to what is being filmed and possible job leads near me. I would highly recommend that if you're trying to break into this world [which admittedly is cliquey] getting in via catering. It is an amazing starting point as an entry level role.

<So there it is, my [very condensed] journey to where I am now. The downfall of this industry is of course, that there can end up being breaks in employment when there is no shoot to move on to. That's where I am now, which is why I decided to write this blog. I want to document if i can break into the production world on a deeper level, what I learn as I work and maybe show people how I've done it as a girl from the middle of nowhere in Northern Ireland with zero connections. If I can do it, you can probably do it too :] >

[noisytenant]

You can stop capitalism and the attention economy from sucking the joy out of art for you right now*

*at the small price of, perhaps, your hopes and dreams.

Commodification and competition only suck the joy out of art when you buy into them. If you want to make art for fun and not worry about attention economies and algorithms then literally just stop worrying about them, and accept the consequences of that.

What are the consequences? There are artists who have successfully risen to a living wage off posting their art online, and in the shadow of these prominent but rare figures it is difficult not to dream of having even a sliver of their luck. And this is to say nothing about the social and emotional fulfillment of sharing art with others, but I'll be focusing on the economics here.

It's luck. Commercially successful artists who seem to have "gamed the algorithm" are prone to survivorship bias--it's impossible to know how many artists have tried the same tactics only to get nowhere. And most will attest that every step of these attention-economy-appeasing rituals is demoralizing and exhausting. Many--even those who succeed--give up or take a step back.

But if these rituals are so awful, why perform them? To potentially increase the meager chances of economic success as an internet artist? To see your engagement numbers go up?

I don't want to tell people to give up on this dream because I believe it is impossible. Instead, it is possible, which is the trap. And when the entire economy and job market are so dire, it's difficult not to dream of that lottery ticket.

I do believe we can live in a world where we can survive and make the art that brings us joy--Through significant effort and numerous systemic changes at every level of culture and society. And in the meantime, there is a huge grey area of economic sustainability--if you make even a little money off your art, that's more in your pocket.

But hobbyist artists have been making and continue to make art out of joy and curiosity regardless of how popular or commercially viable it is, it's just harder to find them on common online platforms. They're in your neighborhood, at work, in your family and probably among your friends, sitting at the library leafing through a "How to Draw" book or signing up for an adult beginner's class, if they have the money. And when we promote the idea that art is fun for everyone, we make more space for people to enjoy it.

We have a finite amount of time and energy every day. Our capitalist economy saps us of both such that we have very little left to devote to our passions. But we fail to realize how much more we lose investing in an arbitrary and fickle economy that is, in fact, entirely optional. If you work a day job with clearly defined hours, you may spend several hours miserably--and that is a problem that needs addressing--but your day ends. Meanwhile, the work of a professional internet artist is never done--You are always on the clock.

I feel heartbroken when I see artists lamenting how joyless, soul-sucking, and uninspiring art has become for them in the midst of our current circumstances. I think they are correct in identifying that the attention economy saps them of this joy--But they are not seeing the forest for the trees.

It is the difference between the expectation of success and the reality of disappointment, rather than the disappointment itself, that leads to such a depressing state of affairs. Let go of the idea that sufficient effort scales with reward in a system as arbitrary as ours. Save your energy. The best way to win is not to play.

Art is as beautiful and life-affirming as it ever was. Realize what it has to offer you, and realize what you need from elsewhere. We still need food and a roof over our heads. We still need friends and community. If we want art to occupy a joyful space in our lives, we need to rely on other parts of ourselves to get through the sometimes boring, tedious, and depressing work of living our daily lives.

Our capitalist system and its associated attention economy deserve every criticism they can get, but if we fail to question their fundamental assumptions, we will never truly move past them. We have the autonomy to untangle capital from our artistic lives, if not completely, at least to a more manageable state.

So, believe that art can be fun again. The things you want to see in the world are waiting for you to make them.

[ink-flavored]

💘💙 💞

thank you!!

💘 List 3 traits you admire in one of your OCs (preferably ones that you’d like to emulate in your own life).

Okay, I know Pride is a demon and a murderer and literally sided with Lucifer and makes people hate each other for fun, but he DOES have good qualities. Sometimes.

In the process of his development, Pride has ended up having a lot of traits I wish I had. The very sin he's named for is where a lot of it comes from, funnily enough. He doesn't give a fuck about laws or conventions, breaking rules out of spite and not caring what other people think. He is whatever the exact opposite of a perfectionist is, doing the bare minimum and going "I'm the best and I deserve a medal" -- which isn't always a good thing, but man I wish I had the capacity to do that a lot more often. And even though a lot of the time he is defending himself from things that are not attacks, Pride fights back when he's feels like he's been wronged, unabashedly and without guilt-- I am slowly learning to do this but whew!

💙 Which of your OCs would be your best friend (if they were to exist in real life)? Which would be your worst enemy?

I want to be best friends with Hayden because he has 5 baby dragons and that sounds like my dream life. I would absolutely pet-sit those babies, literally whenever. Plus, he's a nice guy, he's cheerful in spite of adversity, and is generally fun to be around.

I don't know if I'd say "worst enemy" but Park does not want to talk about anything other than baseball and I really. really. do not like sports. Sorry dude.

💞 List 3 tropes that you feature in your WIPs and explain why they’re important to you as a person.

Opposites Attract/Unlikely Friends

I only noticed this one recently, but I really enjoy writing characters that, by all rights, should not like each other, but are actually in love and/or best friends. I just think this trope is fun to write tbh! Concocting two people who shouldn't get along and then having to analyze their characters enough to find something they connect on, and build their relationship out from that one thing, and they change each other's perspective on thew way... it is so so enriching for me. I love it.

2. Redemption/People Can Change

This one is really important to me, and it's always done on purpose. I believe that people can change for the better (or worse, but usually I'm writing it "for better"), no matter how many bad things they've done. Sure, it doesn't erase the harm they might have caused, but anyone can realize their behavior is hurting people and stop doing it. And they can be a good person. I think it's really important to tell those stories, especially in such a polarizing time and the rise of internet "if you've done anything bad ever in your life we are allowed to drag you through the mud for it" culture.

3. Monster/"Evil" Creature Getting Soft Unconditional Love

Being told over and over that you are wrong, monstrous, ugly, disgusting, etc. until you start believing it, then one day someone comes along and goes No, Actually, I Love All Of You, No Exceptions? Gets me every time.

BONUS TROPE: Oblivious Mutual Pining

I write this a lot and it is because I think it's funny. And also because there are a lot of times in life that we (proverbial "we") assume that the people in our lives couldn't possibly like and/or love us the same way we do, so we corral our feelings so we don't come across as "too much" or desperate for attention, or whathaveyou. But like... the world would be a much happier, brighter place, full of a lot more love and a lot less misunderstanding if people were simply honest with each other. And seeing the two idiots get together and love each other honestly is, I think, a genuine reflection of that.

We can laugh at "haha the idiots love each other but can't tell even when it's so obvious" but there's a reason it resonates with so many people. It's yearning for something we wish we were brave enough to do.

[send me an "up close and personal" ask]

[no-passaran]

Great post OP! Thank you so much.

I would like to add: it discourages actual research on the demographic you're siding with.

For example, when people were claiming Achilles and other Ancient Greek heroes were black because [insert long pseudohistorical theory and lots of jumping to conclusions about Mediterranean peoples], lots of people were quickly content to add these black characters in the Iliad and...that's it. People realised they could get mad at people for representing Ancient Greek stories with white casts and pressured to add black people (with no thought about Greek/Mediterranean people) but at no point did they have to question 1) their rigid ethnocentric and present-centric views of race. They could continue to consider race universal to every time period and place on earth, without having to do the work to realise race is a social construct and its perception changes depending on culture. Many of the people involved in that discourse on the supposedly anti-racist side were treating race as a biological truth.

And 2) it only results in an extremely surface-level change. If they want "diverse stories", now they could just change the race of a few characters and that's it, no need to keep thinking about it. It stops the reflection on why did we lack black characters in the acclaimed mythology and literature that our society values. It's saying "hey, let's keep telling the same European stories, let's keep using the same Eurocentric measurements for what's valuable and good and what isn't" and it stops the consideration of, you know, if we want more black characters in mythology, there's a myriad of black cultures with hundreds and thousands years of stories, mythologies, literature (oral or otherwise) and other art forms that we aren't paying attention to. The problem of not knowing any black mythological characters (and what that means about the society we grew up in) isn't solved by saying "ah yes I do, because Achilles was actually black" without ever considering that African and African diaspora mythologies and literatures are just as fascinating, and why our society has historically considered Greco-Roman cultures superior and has developed systems of evaluating how """good""" something is based on them.

The same thing goes for many other arts. For example when people were claiming Beethoven was black because his death mask shows the symptoms of how your face changes after you die. I completely understand the relief in being able to tell White people "look! Black people have collaborated in your history! Black people have created these art pieces that you value so much!" and thus... Black people make art as good as White people and prove that Black people are equal and deserve the same rights and respect. And all of that is great and again I don't blame anyone for needing this validation from White people (or whatever their oppressor group is) because that's what society builds us to do, but I'm afraid that in Internet discourse this has often just ended there, it hasn't developed past "Beethoven was actually black" into other, deeper questions like "why is upper-class European music the one we value above others? Why is this one the symbol of elegance?" and it doesn't seem to have motivated many people involved in the discourse to go and research African and African diaspora music styles. When they're incredibly diverse and I'm sure many people would love them! The instruments and rhythms are different and it can be very cool to hear new stuff that you haven't been exposed to before. And also even if you don't like the ones you find (because our taste is developed according to what we've been exposed to) you will have gained a deeper understanding of human diversity and cultures and the possibilities of human creativity.

A note because this is the Internet and we all know people like to read things with the worst faith interpretation possible: if you're a fanfic writer who writes Greek/Hellene characters from Greek mythology as black characters, I don't care, you do you. Art is one thing and you can interpret it as you want. Though a certain amount of respect for the original story is important when you're telling a story that is as culturally-relevant as this, art is always understood to be subjective and a reflection of the author. If you're claiming it's an objective historical fact, that's where you're wrong.

Anti-racist, feminist, labour, etc organizations (almost always) do all these reflections very well. My criticisms are directed at the people who spread this pseudohistory and don't care that it's fake.

Lastly, I would like to add: if you don't look at facts, how do you know that what you feel is true is actually true? Do you think that conservatives don't feel that racialized people lesser, do you think they don't feel that women exist just to take care of men, do you think they don't feel that disabilities make you less worthy of rights? And does society not raise us all with such ideas all around us? If you don't care about facts, how do you know that what others feel is true is actually wrong, but what you feel is true is actually right?

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

[kaoarika]

So, there was a post about "white whales" of unexisting/unrealized media that basically became a reblog prompt post, but OP turned off the reblogs some time recently? I don't know, but I had a draft based on it, but I dunno how Tumblr may bypass that since the draft has been there since August 2022, so... rather than posting it, I will post my thoughts about the twt/tumblr prompt here instead (OP link was this one, with some interesting responses) and I will also turn my reblogs off just in case bc I don't want this post to surface in the tags or search and all that :P

Pop culture "white whales" of mine, or at least, some of them:

Continuation of Kia Asamiya's Corrector Yui. Imagine mystifying this version of the manga for over 2 decades and just now, a few months ago, you find that it was "incomplete" because I don't remember AT ALL anyone mentioning it in the few English fansites that existed back in the day. not even vaguely? :/c I mean, YEAH. I can SEE it only had 2 volumes, but come on.

Edgar Wright's version of the Ant-man movie. That's all.

Obviously the Dance with Devils AYAIBD 2016 event recorded footage that is PRETTY obvious Avex Media did record, but for one reason or another it was never released on DVD and/or BD. And, like, even if Avex DID recognize the existence of the event while including part of the script in the 2020 BD box-set of the series and fan recounts still exist online, the full footage never saw the light of the day. No one knows why, only speculations about it. I find it a little weird, but I have a slight idea on why they did this, as I wrote in another post, years ago.

These are much more local cases, I think? And perhaps not "famous", per se. Some stuff related to original manga-like published series in my country, Mexico. There was a time, before the internet and social media and sites like DA existed, where a couple of local publishers had their hands on publishing manga-inspired comics as anthology series-like in comic book format and in magazine form. The projects seemed to have died because they didn't sell as they wanted, and wanted to focus in better stuff, I guess. And perhaps stuff that I'm probably just scratching the surface of, because it's probably also stuff about authors' disagreements with their editors/publisher and/or more serious stuff that I may not know of behind the scenes. Many of these series were "officially" cut short. The thing is, what I'm partly? sure of is that, at least some of these creators got their works' rights back and perhaps, there's a possibility they DID publish them in some way or form thanks to more indie endeavors and/or the internet and also sold them through the anime/comics conventions circuit (especially in the Valley of Mexico, ie CDMX and its metropolitan area), a circuit I didn't frequent as I live in the north of the country :// (and I only went to the ones in my city during the summer from 2007 through 2016). But, I do remember a more scummy example :/. In a similar fashion as the infamous Tokyopop manga contests in the US, there was this animanga magazine that organized their own manga contest in the mid 2000s. The contest had a winner and I remember they even announced the winner was going to have their own series published on the same publisher and the like... Thing is, the date came and went and I don't remember the series was ever published (and, look, I know some of the magazines I used to buy back in the day had a weird distribution in the rest of the country, but I still had access to newspapers' stands as I lived in the afforementioned Valley of Mexico area until mid 2010). EVEN SO, the artist did some stuff for the magazine, yes. But, eventually the magazine changed their focus to more cartoon/Di*sney stuff and had a more tweeny/teen demography, and this isn't the only scummy thing they did that I remember, btw. I don't even know what the winner even did afterwards, but I hope they, at LEAST, has an artistic hobby or is doing some great stuff in any of the webcomic/webtoon platforms or hosting it in DA or on their own. I don't know. (To add salt to the injury I cannot look properly to what happened to the series per se because there's barely any mention online about the magazine that organized the contest, either. Be it because, again, we -lots of times- fail to archive stuff like this and, even if there was a mention about this online, many message boards from that time and era ceased to exist in the past 10 years and so)

These are all at the tip of my tongue at the moment.

[bainhardt]

Watched Folding Ideas' video about James Rolfe tonight and I thought about it a lot. I don't know how well I'm able to articulate what it made me think. I've been on a long streak of piddling ideas away into oblivion but I still have a blog on this funny website so I figured might as well use it for a change. I guess even the contents of my comment didn't feel like everything I had to say in reflection.

In a broader sense, I realized after the video I find it really compelling to have seen by now more than a handful of videos "dissecting" various aspects of James Rolfe's career on Youtube, the broad and incalculable influence AVGN had on the platform and content on it. Whether he "fell off" (or was ever especially good in the first place), et cetera

Thinking about this one, I began to wonder if maybe the core problem, one not even about James but more highlighted by him, is that the internet confers fame and success in ways inconsistent with institutional expectation of those things

It's easy to determine that James is not a genius, not a visionary creative or some kind of prodigy. His body of work doesn't hold up to much rigorous critical scrutiny (although I still love a good chunk of it). It's even arguable whether he's especially hardworking or persistent because the nature of internet content is there are simultaneously too many and too few contemporaries to draw direct comparison with. There are no good standards to apply when trying. At bare minimum, it can be said that he appears to love what he does... or did at one point, depending on who you ask.

The thing is that whoever has succeeded in the age of the internet is totally random. And this feels like a wrongness, a violation of the maxim that what should succeed in the world of art is that which is good, or better yet, "great." Work that is thoughtfully crafted and purposefully designed. Work with meaning. Something at least superior to something else. But that isn't how the internet has shaped culture in the modern age. Anything can work. Oftentimes it's what you think shouldn't work. It's like we want it to follow rules and make sense, and it doesn't.

It's not a strictly internet issue either... I'm old enough to remember when I first heard backlash about people like Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian "being famous for being famous." Reality television schlock. The ever-present judgment that someone successful doesn't deserve it. But it feels like a gradual shift that has become louder in the era of post-2000s pop culture because of the internet. I guess it's possible there's actual analysis of this I'm not aware of. Potentially on an even longer scale of time. It sounds really interesting. The breakdown of the instincts that can assess not necessarily what should be "popular," but even just what will succeed at all. The way this feels alienating for a certain subset of people.

I don't know what to say about it on a grand scale. I don't think it's suddenly become wrong to employ critical techniques or try to assess whether works of art feel quality. But I can see a pattern of disappointment emerge in those who do so when applied to the broader cultural landscape of the internet. I definitely think the internet is the catalyst. It's like a new frontier where attempts to stratify standards are endlessly futile, frustrating, and bewildering for creatives.

[foolish-moods]

capitalism fears AI

ok yeah we all got our anxiety about it it ain't unreason able to shake in yer wee booties when something new and ACtUALLY able to change the world is sprinting at us at mach 5 (maybe 6)

im no artist maybe i write a bit, but like i get it, seeing the soulless machines rip you and your friend shit off these promptbros passing their PROMPT SKILLS off as legit like we aint one step away from bashing them in the head with a rock yeah it sucks and its bad feels that make other bad feels feel badder and not in the good way

BUT ok here me out AI taking your jobs is....... a good thing (eventually) some time in the future))

lemme explain:

The creation and improvement upon tools has been and continues to be the greatest driving force behind human progress throughout our entire history. I'm not just speaking of technology and science either, I'm talking about everything, social and cultural advances included. A good example is the Polynesians whose ways of life, traditions, knowledge, and beliefs are heavily influenced by their early discovery and use of ships to sail an ocean that other people believed to be impossible to navigate. This is true, to an extent, for just about everyone and everything else.

The industrial revolution happened fast, faster than anything before it, because the breakthroughs that occurred compounded upon themselves. When a new discovery and subsequent tool was made, this in turn allowed for another discovery and subsequent tool. It became a cycle of development that grew exponentially, we went from horse drawn carriages to landing on the moon in 60 years. Obviously I'm heavily simplifying things, but you get the gist.

It was a wild time that necessitated change within society. Old ways just weren't compatible with the new ones and to not adjust would lead to instability and falling behind. It's no coincidence that radical new ideologies formed during this era because the possibilities of these ideologies coming to fruition were now truer than ever. New tools meant new opportunities, new ways of life, and sticking with the old not only started to make less and less sense but it became difficult to do so.

When capitalism first started it was unchecked and ruthless, far worse than what we have today. The working conditions were appalling even if you weren't an indentured slave and there was truly zero concerns outside of making a profit. Adjusted for inflation, the net worth of those early capitalists like Rockefeller and Ford make our current billionaires look like chumps and that's when money represented tangible gold.

As new tools were made this bolstered capitalists, it allowed them to keep up profits despite increasing regulations, yet it also had a side effect for the common people. For example, mass use of physical labor became less and less efficient as factories and machines became more and more numerous. Why hire (or enslave) workers to attend a field when you could buy a fleet tractors and do the same work in a quarter of the time for a fraction of the cost? This wasn't just an obvious business decision, it was also a shift pushed by the changing ideals. I'm not saying slavery was abolished because of tractors (partially because one occurred much earlier than the other) but I am saying new tools opened up the opportunity for social considerations that were previously thought of as being out of reach. Which is to say I don't think Marx would have been nearly as influential as he was and is if he were born before the widespread use of the printing press.

Then came computers. I don't think I have to state how massive of a change this introduced to the world. Even if you were born into this digital era you only have to read up and watch some things from 30 to 40 years ago to see the stark difference. When I was a kid less than half of the people in the US had internet access, not computers, just plain internet access (as in a local library), now it's more than 90% and it's in their pocket. I'm sure you've likely heard this spiel before, but it's important to understand how tools affect the world. It's also important to know that computers used to be a job that people were hired to do.

So, back to my original point, why does capitalism (or more accurately: capitalists) fear AI? Because of automation. Take the tractor example from before, there is an issue there that has been a point of contention with all new and powerful tools: the reduction in necessary labor and skill to achieve the same or better result. Historically this has been mostly a concern for the workers, not the capitalists, who are stripped of a source of income by automation and forced to find work elsewhere, however the capitalists themselves aren't immune to it. We all know about Blockbuster and how it was dealt a quick and sudden deathblow by online streaming. In just a few clicks anyone with access could watch a movie without ever leaving their home, a complete automation of the entire renting process including what goes on behind the scenes that the customer never sees. Blockbuster couldn't adapt like other companies (Netflix) since they had too much invested into their physical locations, product procurement, work force, and a desperate hope that streaming was just a fad. The company died, miserably, because of automation, and everyone who worked there had to pack up and leave. They're far from the only business to be killed or severely diminished in a similar way, I mean travel agents can tell you all about that, but they're a very clear example of what can happen.

Yet as a whole automation has readily been welcomed by capitalists. The production output of the modern world is only possible because of it and major companies almost entirely owe their profits to it. Even smaller companies that don't produce goods rely upon automation in one way or another. I mean what is google if not an automated librarian for a library that no human workforce could ever properly manage? Would a family owned business for pressure washing have the same success without google to help them be discovered by people looking for their service?

But AI is different, we can feel it in the air. Anxiety over new tech has always happened, yet something about AI really kicks up the dust in a way comparable to nukes. I mean literally, some people think it's going to lead to the destruction of humanity, that's a pretty big deal. Maybe they're right, maybe Skynet will kill us all, I really doubt it but just like I how doubt nuclear war will ever happen I still acknowledge it's certainly possible.

No, I think the reason why people like Elon Musk and AI developers are so scared of it is because of the existential threat it posses - not to humanity - but to capitalism and the society that clings to it. Where automation before was on a scale small enough that the displacement of workers wasn't a major issue, AI flips that on its head and claims the very real potential of replacing millions upon millions of jobs worldwide in a figurative snap of the finger. Imagine what would happen if just one major job was entirely replaced by AI within a few years like accounting, that would be over a million unemployed people in just the US. Now imagine the same for managers, consultants, clerks, security, engineers, doctors, and so on. It might sound ridiculous, but if you think AI can destroy humanity then how is this anymore absurd? You may think there's no way people would let that happen, to which I ask: would the capitalist whose main concern with profits let it? If you've paid attention at all to how they operate, then you know the answer is yes. In their pursuit of endless profits, there is only one way forward, to embrace AI. You don't have to pay AI wages, you don't have to give them benefits, you don't have build and manage offices, you don't have to deal with human error and inefficiencies. Every company will be forced to adopt AI or fail, and by doing so they create more and more unemployed people with no source of income.

So what about these these people with no income, what happens with them? It's rather simple, they don't participate in the system, because they cant, and the more jobs automated the less participants there are. Less participants means less money flowing, less products being sold, less profits being made. This obviously can't work, it would be like driving a car straight into a concrete wall. It would be a level of unemployment and unrest far beyond anything before it, the Great Depression would pale in comparison, extreme unrest would sweep the world if something isn't quickly done to counterbalance it. I don't exactly how it'd be handled, it could go many ways, but in this new environment of widescale automation I'm certain the very concept of money and wealth will be called into question and with it the billionaires who cling to these concepts for power.

That's the beautiful irony of it all. In the end, the only thing to kill capitalism is capitalism itself. Total ideological suicide.

This right here is why there is so much fear around AI. It's why propaganda is being created to sow distrust of it, to fill our heads with ideas of misuse and the potential for annihilation or dystopia. It's why the default assumption is that AI will be malevolent. It's why considering the benefits is seen as naïve. It's why they want to pause the experiment and to carefully tailor it so they can give the crippled bureaucracies the time they need to regulate and ban it. That's the capitalist's only hope to cling onto their empires of greed, to turn everyone against it so they don't have to use it. It's a paradox they desperately want to escape. It's too late though, the writing is on the wall, it can't be stopped, someone will inevitably push it through and force them to follow suit and march right off the cliffs edge, lest they dare lose out on potential revenue.

Of course, it will be a very bumpy road for all of us, society as whole will have to adjust faster than it ever has before and a lot innocent people are going to get hurt. Ultimately though, I believe AI is the key to a utopia where people can finally just enjoy life how they want without the constant stress of manmade obligations, pursing things for the sake of the experience and not to pay bills. If you've watched Star Trek then you know what the possibility looks like.

[mishafletcher]

Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I've been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping. 

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don't even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you're somehow owed information about my sexual history. You're not! No one—and I can't reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don't feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you're traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can't sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can't talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that's good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don't have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but— 

You don't owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They're yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they're probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There's a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren't failed lesbians. They're not somehow less good or less valid because they're attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I've checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who've had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I'm sorry to report that "I'm disgusted by a standard-issue human body part" is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I'm a dyke and I don't especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don't have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn't make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There's so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven't noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there's a whole pandemic thing that's been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you're worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people's genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something. 

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it's always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to "solicit homosexual or lesbian activity", which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn't have to recognize them if they didn't want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who's older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers. 

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn't be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that's worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You've capitalized it, like it's Weighty and Important, but it's not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don't have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too. 

[attanoempire]

Sun Venus Saturn Uranus

Sun - Ah now we get to the hard ones, I see. I'm patient, I have good control of my emotions most of the time, I'm loyal sometimes to a fault (though not without lines), I'm tall, and... I have very nice calves. Bit weak toward the end but we got there.

Venus - Passionate, caring, intelligent, witty. I like someone with a strong personality, a protective streak, and who isn't afraid to be passionately weird and show it. I also have some preferences that lean toward shorter and more homicidal women. What can I say, even with a sub, there being at least some possibility she stabs me is hot.

Saturn - Trying my best not to just answer "everything" lmao.

For real though, I have some pretty glaring weaknesses. Hypervigilance has me always reading hostility or problems where there are none and then doomspiraling about it, and on the flipside also means I'm basically immune to all but the most direct advances. Low intuitive empathy means I often struggle conceptualizing viewpoints too far from my own. Lacking executive function is hell in general but also specifically makes academia a waking nightmare (get on your fucking meds Ira). I have a bevy of troubles reading people socially that leads to an occasional bad habit of treating people like puzzles to be solved/fixed instead of, y'know, people, because they're easier to understand that way.

Outside shit that's more directly informed by trauma or mental illness, my memory is just also hot garbage, I have some impressively terrible luck, and related but separate to that I have the worst timing of anyone I have ever known. If there is a wrong time to walk into a room, check my messages, do something, or to NOT do any of those, you can be damn sure I'll stumble into it flawlessly.

Hm. Might be telling that I have two paragraphs and could go on about my flaws but struggle to conceptualize five bullet points I like about myself. Oop.

Uranus - Oh boy, we could be here all day, but let me just speedrun some of the changes I would enact if given supreme dictatorial power.

Scale back luxury production, appropriate most billionaire wealth and put them on trial, ensure food/water/housing/internet is universally available to everyone before allowing anyone to have so much as a winter cabin, abolish profit-driven capitalism and fiduciary duty and corporations as we know them, instead implement a similar system to allow people to contribute to projects they believe in/are qualified for, prevent generational accumulation of power via currency/possessions, aggressively expand the schooling system until classrooms are more like 1:5-10 instead of 1:25-35, make post-secondary education freely available, make mental health checkups a routine universal procedure and aggressively expand mental health resources, abolish the prison-industrial system in favour of tremendous spending on restorative and reformative justice (and either low-pop prison or exile for the unreformable, I guess?)

Just, y'know, to name a couple of things. I think at a more cultural level we also really need to address concepts like parenthood, sexuality, and religion.

We've been changing slowly but coasting a lot on "the ways things were done" for far too long. The US still makes laws based on the assumed views of people from the 1700s and a 2000 year old religion, we still think people should have absolute dominion over their child-rearing as long as they don't physically abuse the kid, and murder is PG but a penis is so taboo you rarely even see it in R-rated films.

But yeah no living in this world is great I love going to work and paying my taxes while wars rage and the earth burns.

[andromeda3116]

i mean... yeah, this.

like, as much as i love the chaos of this site, it cannot survive without a revenue stream. and it appears that they're doing everything they can to make this site profitable without mining critical data from the users. the "for you" tab pretty clearly bases its "algorithm" on the things that i have liked and/or reblogged, as well as the things people i follow have liked and/or reblogged, and that's... pretty tame, in today's environment. its assumption is that if someone i follow likes this thing, then probably i like it too. (it is often wrong.)

but it doesn't seem engineered to make you feel an emotion, unlike facebook's infamous algorithm which is explicitly designed to make you as outraged as possible. it seems to be -- at least at this stage -- an ai version of looking through an author's bookmarks on ao3. and as long as it stays like that -- and stays optional, which is extremely key -- i'm okay with it!

the thing is, tumblr is a relic of a past version of the internet. people don't really blog anymore. it doesn't appeal to the youngsters whose entire internet experience has been curated and algorithm-ed to death. we joke about this site's aging userbase, but it's aging because this site is the last bastion of the time when the internet was the community of the weird. the era of webrings and message boards and livejournal communities, where "the internet" was where the weird kids who had nothing in common with their peers went to talk to people who actually understood them.

and that's great, and wonderful, and makes this site a bizarre, inexplicable, fun place to be -- but servers are expensive and maintaining huge sites with heavy traffic costs a lot of money.

do i think that automattic -- or any corporation -- genuinely has anyone's best interests at heart except their shareholders? no. but i do feel like they are trying to find a balance between letting tumblr be itself and making enough money to sustain the site, because they know that tumblr is not ever going to be tiktok and the only way to keep the userbase is to let it keep being weird? yeah, okay, i can buy that.

it's like a less-insanely-dystopian version of disney buying out marvel -- is it a soulless cash grab? yes. are they watering things down to make them more palatable to a larger audience? obviously. is this horrifyingly indicative of a larger societal problem with corporations, the internet, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and human nature? absolutely. but will they try to fundamentally change the nature of the stories that drew people to them in the first place? not unless they're incredibly fucking stupid, they won't.

look, i would love to keep tumblr being the home of the anti-capitalist unprofitable weirdos with our own culture that the rest of the internet finds both deeply incomprehensible and incredibly magnetic. i would love for us to always be unmarketable. but the sad and horrific reality is that we live in a world now where nothing is allowed to be unmarketable. and for tumblr to survive, it must evolve.

and as long as they're not doing that by mining my data from other sites i visit, or from my personal information, or from me having my location turned on so i can use gps to not get lost -- i can live with that. sure, it's shoving ads in my face and that's fucking annoying, but it's not tailoring those ads to information extrapolated from whose phone was near mine for an extended period of time, or which headlines pissed me off enough to get me to click on the link, or the random question i googled, or the store i visited.

does it suck absolute fucking ass that we live in a world where "hey, at least these insufferable ads being shoved in my face weren't selected by an artificial intelligence that has somehow accessed my entire personality based on my interactions with people and articles and products in completely different spheres that i didn't even know the site knew about" is the best social media experience available right now? absolutely!!!!! it's objectively insane!!!!! how the fuck has it gotten this bad!!!!!

but this is unfortunately the world we live in right now. and to keep holding on to our little corner of the internet, where we can stay weird and blog like it's 2010 and default to seeing chronological posts from people we have personally selected to follow, i am willing to accept certain concessions.

Was going to write this as a reply to something but realized it needed its own post.

The tl;dr is that, from the looks of it, Automattic absolutely has every intention of turning Tumblr into a marketing media platform.

I work for a marketing company. I build websites.

Specifically, I build websites on Wordpress.org, which is operated by the Wordpress Foundation.

The Wordpress Foundation is the non-profit counterpart to the for-profit company Automattic.

Automattic, as we know, is the company that currently owns Tumblr.

Now, the thing about Wordpress.org (not to be confused with Wordpress.com) is that it's very, VERY popular amongst small businesses. Not only can you build a fully-customizable website with relative ease, you can also add an online shop using another Automattic product: Woocommerce.

Not too long ago, I noticed a new feature was added to Woocommerce: A button next to each Woocommerce product which allows you to Blaze them to Tumblr right from the comfort of your dashboard:

This is what I get when I click that little "Blaze" button...

As someone who understands these tools, I understand the potential implications of these features:

The Blaze feature is basically an up-and-coming ad campaign system that's directly integrated with Woocommerce websites, which I think is the first ad marketing system of its kind. You don't have to log into a social media account to advertise your products, use a second-party integration, or even pay another service to manage your social media ads. It's all baked right into your business's website.

THIS is their planned money-maker, folks, not the rainbow checkmarks or crab armies. And the reason why Automattic would do this kind of thing is simple: Businesses are wealthier than individuals. By implementing a B2B service, Automattic can make more money off of Tumblr than user subscriptions and shoelaces will ever provide.

It's all the same song and dance. Businesses can now shove more ads into your face in a new, convenient fashion. It'll be ads that don't look like ads disguised amongst ads that do look like ads, just like it is with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and literally every other marketing media service that calls itself a "social" media.

(Tumblr's new video feature? My guess is that it's there to prepare for video-format Blaze campaigns. Influencer-style videos are the only kind of ad format Gen-Z is receptive to, which is why you're suddenly seeing videos on every platform.)

All they really gotta do now is make Tumblr look appealing to the normies so they can draw in a userbase that isn't trying to escape the onslaught of commercialism that plagues other sites.

Tumblr is one of the last true social medias we have; a place where content is made purely for the sake of talking about it. But given the writing on the wall...I doubt it'll stay that way.