#rant (?)

[feathery-dreamer]

Oh yeah it's one thing being insulted or mocked or hated by a tiny number of strangers. One thing receiving that from some rando on the street, or a faceless account on the internet. A single or a small number of people you haven't met before and likely will never meet again, you can move on after acknowledging it hurt.

It's a whole different matter when it comes from somebody you know, love and care about. Or when it's someone who has (or represents) authority over you and thus controls your future. Or when somebody you know/love/trust/obey (see previous) has another person they know/love/trust/obey, and that other person says those things.

It gets even worse with repetition, either from the same person(s) or from thousands (especially easy on the internet). You may not shut down or harm yourself after one hate message every few weeks, but if it just keeps coming that can lead to the worst. Some "get used to it" by growing desensitized, and lose empathy for others in the process; I don't view that as "improvement".

All this to say: don't sweep that shit under the rug, it'll make a lump you'll constantly trip on later.

People always say: "Not everyone is gonna like you, and that's ok, nothing to take personally, it doesn't matter" yet it still sucks. It sucks when it's your teacher, it sucks when it's your boss or co-worker or family member. It even sucks when it's a friends friend or someone we barely know. It hurts. And you do not have to gaslight yourself into thinking that it doesn't hurt when it does. You're allowed to be upset when life is hard. You're allowed to feel an emotion, even more when it makes perfect logical sense. We talk to a friend about our feelings, journal, reflect, use coping skills. We find peace after a while, that's a more realistic solution. You got this. It will be ok.

[acrobaticsilky]

ekko loving jinx or powder is a meaningless argument cuz the entire point of episode 7 is for both ekko and you the viewer to learn "jinx" and "powder" are the same person and ekko loves that person— not their good side or their bad side, but the whole package.

that's why their love song is called my best enemy, and talks about the worst blessings and the best curses. and that's how he can talk jinx off the ledge. the contradiction of being in love with your enemy is the entire basis of their story.

powder at one point literally asks him point blank "so you want me to change?" and he flat out says no: cuz he knows everything that makes 'powder' powder given one favorable set of circumstances also makes 'jinx' jinx given another set of unfavorable circumstances.

there is no powder or jinx, it's just ekko and his blue-haired paramour, in every timeline.

[qqueenofhades]

hi I hope you don't mind but I would love to hear your long tired historian rant you mentioned in your tags on that one post, if you feel in the mood to share? (no pressure!)

(also thank you for existing, you do wonderful work and the world is a better place for you being in it)

Aha. Well. For context, the mention of said rant was in relation to this post:

Basically, this post struck a nerve because of how it exactly encapsulates the anti-intellectual, anti-academia, anti-historical, anti-reality thinking that is absolutely rampant in social media spaces, even and especially spaces that identify as leftist, liberal, or otherwise "superior" to the right wing when it comes to identifying fake news or misinformation. (Example A: anything ever written by a self-proclaimed leftist on Twitter.) We all know that there are huge problems with the American public school system (and the people writing this are almost always American) and the American practice of education in general, and that yes, there are many things that happened in the past (or y'know, the present!) that are not taught very well, or at all. But because the American public school system is so decentralized and largely autonomous, incredibly dependent on the temperament of local superintendents and/or school boards, taxation and funding, availability of teachers, requirement of useless standardized tests, etc., it is very difficult (if not outright impossible) to claim that this is the result of a Unified Grand Conspiracy To Not Teach Real History To The Youth In Order To Make Them Mindlessly Support Capitalism. That is the exact sort of deranged conspiratorial thinking that the right wing does and fits everything into a sinister narrative about how "They" are planning to keep you ignorant and therefore nothing harmful that you ever think or do is really your fault. It's not good.

(Whoosh. That was very calm and reasonable of me. For the rest of this post, please just picture Captain Holt "apparently that's a trigger for me" dot gif.)

Also: even in public school, and despite the Republicans' best efforts, there are plenty of opportunities to study complex or "controversial" subjects. For example, I spend a week every June grading AP Euro History exams with a lot of other educators in a giant windowless steel box (woo-hoo, fun times!) Every year, there are questions on the exam about women's rights, imperialism and exploitation, slavery/race relations, the development of capitalism and the current economic model, religion and science, the history of labor, and other topics that would be considered "controversial" if you're an idiot. This is an exam taken by high school students in all grades from across the country, and there are also AP World History and APUSH (US history) exams every year which are doubtless making an effort to address similar themes. This is an advanced program, yes, but it's widely available to many schools and is not a result of a sinister plot to keep the youth from discovering the truth. Also: you live in an era of absolutely unprecedented access to information. Put down the ChatGPT bullshit generator and visit a goddamn public library. Or even open Wikipedia. The tools are there for you to start educating yourself and they are so easy to find!!!!!

The "Historians Are Hiding The Truth!!!" narrative becomes even more ridiculous in university-level or professional academic historical-study spaces, especially when historical educators and associations (such as the American Historical Association) have been at the forefront of pushing back against right-wing efforts to censor history, punish teachers, and remove culture-war subjects from classrooms. Also as someone who has advanced degrees in history, has taught/worked in several universities in different countries, writes and publishes historical research, and otherwise participates professionally in the field: trust me, we aren't "hiding" shit. There are vigorous debates and disagreements on various bogglingly obscure subjects and points of clarification and so forth, but that doesn't mean we're not talking about them (trust me, we're often talking about them too much). If you're issuing confident blanket statements about how "historians are conspiring to hide x," you're an idiot.

This also has dangerous repercussions in the field of, say, politics and civics, where a lot of absolutely braindead Online Leftists have spent the last four years posting deranged nonsense on social media and then, whenever they're called out on it for that not actually being how anything works at all, whining that "I was never taught this!!!" (And yet, it somehow never actually changes their perspective or their theories....) They whine about how "they didn't know this" and it was someone else's fault, they make up total fantasy about what the Biden administration did or should have done and now are still happy about Trump coming back because "It will teach the Democrats a lesson!!!" and otherwise accelerating us oh-so-quickly down that slippery slippery fascism slope. Their weaponized ignorance and their magical fantasies about what "should" have happened often come back to this same learned helplessness, where it's everyone else's fault (especially Capitalism's) that they're total wankers. Look: I'm not a goddamn fan of capitalism either. But we all grew up in this same system, and some of us aren't raving idiots, so at some point, you have to take the tiniest modicum of personal responsibility for the information you seek out, the content you consume, the opinions you propagate, and the people you surround yourself with. Shocking.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Online Leftists are actively and unrepentantly enabling American fascism and should be treated in the same way as we treat MAGA when it comes to deciding what is good or worthwhile information. This is because their entire political philosophy (insofar as their beliefs can be dignified with the term) is based on the "make shit up and remove it from any basic empirical references, grounding in reality, or 'should I run the most basic Google search and see if I'm completely talking out of my ass in a distorted social media echo chamber? Nah I'm good' " technique. This is, as the original tweet above references, trying to retcon sheer malicious laziness and stupidity into grand ideological theories about how it's actually "better" that they don't know a damn thing and won't shut up. It's your evil history teacher's fault, or "academics are all rich and elitist" (ask any academic-precariat person like me and we will laugh hollowly and then throw monkey poop at you), or "They" wouldn't let you learn this, or on and on. Even in our terrible, awful, no-good very-bad timeline, there are still ample tools to educate yourself, to learn how to filter out bad information and junk news, and otherwise gird yourself even a little for the even-more-massive assault on empirical reality that we are about to experience in the next four years (ugh). I suggest you take advantage of them.

[dangermousie]

I was chatting about this with a mutual and it made me want to expand this because I've been thinking about this for a bit on and off.

I think the disconnect/arguments between people who watch/read books/shows/movies etc, label things as green flag/red flag and complain when there are "problematic" characters or "dynamics" - both in terms of the narratives and people who enjoy these narratives being targets and people who like me love some intense/fucked up/weird stuff is because these two groups of people approach fiction in two fundamentally different and incompatible ways.

The former view it as a sort of aspirational content or self-insert - they want to watch/read about people/lives/situations they would enjoy being in/with in real life. It's sort of a self-insert wish fulfillment, the way other people watch youtube channels about traveling the world or cooking or home decorating - you imagine yourself in this.

And I think this is where the disconnect comes in - because a decent chunk of them assume everyone else uses fiction for the same reason so if you enjoy e.g., watching a dysfunctional relationship or a bad dude/lady or some world set up that is nuts it's because you think this is all great in real world and that you want to be (or be with) with a problematic partner/in problematic situation and you think it's morally worthwhile.

To that former "aspirational" type of fiction consumer, fiction taste = morality.

But the disconnect is that for that latter "we like fucked up/dark/problematic/intense/whatever" group it's not really about aspiration or self-insert. People didn't love Hannibal because they secretly long to run off and cook humans in a stew. The fans of 2ha don't really want to kidnap their hot teacher and keep them as a sex slave in a palace. Harem dramas aren't popular because women are dying to poison and frame others to get to sleep with a fat old powerful megalomaniac. Most of consumers of mafia romances don't really think it's a great idea in real life to be taken against your will by a hot killer with abs who can't control himself around you and is great at forcing you into orgasms against your will.

That latter group (among which I find myself) likes all that stuff precisely because it's nothing they have or want to have in real life. It's a safe way to explore fantasies that would not be great in real life (I assure you most people who have noncon fantasies don't want to be raped in real life; also in real life no most people don't want to bang a buff but super murdery villain; fiction is a safe place in a way) but also to explore situations and interactions and characters you would never want to in real life from the safety of the page/screen. To use a very easy example - think of the large audience of action movies. I am pretty sure most fans of action franchises don't want to be in car crashes/insane chases/explosions/etc. Any more than roller coaster enthusiasts want to actually be thrown upside down for real or horror movie fans want to either chase someone with an axe or be chased with one. I myself love really intense situations in fiction, ones that push characters to their limits and sometimes beyond, but I cannot imagine anything less pleasant to go through in real life.

Unlike with the self-insert group, this is actually the very opposite. It's like a game of what-if, a glimpse into an alien world fascinating precisely because of its difference with my life. An exploration of aspects of life/relationships that one could never safely or happily do in one's life but are interesting at a safe fictional remove.

This is getting repetitive so I am going to stop but I really do wish more people would understand that enjoying X in fiction does not mean enjoying X in real life (or approving of X in general.) I mean, I love period epics but you'd pry antibiotics and rule of law out of my cold dead hands.

The moral panic over fiction reminds me both the old "video games make you into killers" panic of a few decades ago and the much older belief that reading novels would wreck morals of society especially by those weak women since the novels' (lack of) morality would warp them. Most people have brains and use them and can distinguish between fiction and reality. I wish people would accept that.

P.S. A corollary is conflation of morality/quality/enjoyment. By that I mean I wish more people would accept that moral message, quality, and enjoyment of work are all three separate things. You don't need to prove that some fictional piece is immoral and/or badly made to justify you not enjoying it. It can be well done and just not for you. And conversely, you do not need to prove a work having societal value or being high quality to justify enjoying it. It's fiction. Just enjoy it or don't.

[justuraverageweirdo]

If Sun was a woman, he’d get the same treatment Earth is getting now.

If Moon was a woman, nobody in the fandom would want to look in his direction.

If Lunar was a woman, he’d be called over dramatic and so many other things.

If Solar was a woman, he’d wouldn’t have nearly as large enough of a fanbase as he does right now.

If Eclipse was a woman, I don’t even want to think about how he’d be treated.

If Nexus was a woman, none of the shit he did would have been tossed aside.

If Castor was a woman, we’d already know how he’d be treated because of Pollux.

If Taurus was a woman, again I don’t even want to think about how he’d be treated.

Monty is a woman, but if they were biologically female my point still stands.

If Bloodmoon were women, none of the shit they did would slide. (I say this as a Bloodmoon enthusiast)

If Solar Flare was a woman, he’d be even more ignored by the fanbase than he already is

If KC was a woman, hardly any of his crimes would’ve been forgiven

If Ruin was a woman, oh boy that’s a whole can of worms I’m not going to unpack.

I don’t know Foxy well enough as a character to say, but it’d probably be the same for him.

And there’s so much more.

Why do we give the female characters so much shit.

[cute-girls-from-vns-anime-manga]

I swear to fucking god, I am going to drag every god damn engineer off their asses away from their monitors and force them to run these god damn milling programs that way they get a good understand about what the phrase ORDER OF OPERATIONS MEAN!!!!!!

For fucks sake the amount of interdependencies built into the tool paths is going to drive me mad I cannot simply adjust a single depth of cut why would I have to?! The maths told them that they could run every single tool off of a single offset.

If you are an engineer that follows me do every god damn shop guy a favor and take your head out of your ass, stop arguing with me when I have a problem with your programs I dont care what the math says to me that is barely anything more than educated guess work god damn it.

[annagxx]

[littleperson404]

gotta add on my own rant about the ads thing. really venty rant below the cut lol

i wouldnt use an adblocker if youtube just gave me an actual variety of ads and listened to my input. i wanna give the creators i follow that lil bit of extra income, i really do. but for fucks sake, they pop up SO OFTEN. i have a blocker on my phone and computer, but not my ipad (bc apple.. weeeee). so i'll listen to stuff to fall asleep and get loud ads for grammarly, insurance, company stuff, etc that i just could not care less about. yes, i know kfc is doing a deep fried turkey, i dont have to be told 30+ times a day. im not in the market for insurance bc i literally cannot afford it. i dont own a company, so i dont need ads for web domains or business... things. grammarly i refuse to use just bc i got so many ads for it when it first came out. give me ads for new movies, new toys, new food spots popping up around me. i really shouldnt need to be advertised the exact same ad video 20+ times a day. and i couldnt give less of a fuck about disney's conglomerate of companies it now owns all under disney plus. im also not into horror at all. yet i get ad after ad for up and coming horror movies. and i cant even tell youtube that im not a fan of the genre. it doesnt let me. i've looked and i've tried. it also annoys me to no end when i want to listen to a 5 year old video from someone thats around, say, 30 minutes of content to help me sleep at night. and that video suddenly has at least 5 ads in it disrupting my sleep.

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[blueharuka]

I know I'm likely thinking way too hard into it and probably getting frustrated over nothing but it's grinding my gears to have struggled so hard years ago to get my mom to check out the original animated How To Train Your Dragon film when it first came out (And even once she DID sit down and watch the movie with me, she either paid bills talked on the phone, or did other stuff throughout the entire film), but upon seeing the trailer for the 'live-action remake' of the movie, she exclaims excitedly "Now that looks like something I'd wanna see!"...

To each their own, I suppose, but people who see so little value in anything animated until it's been remade or 'improved' into live-action really piss me off. Animation isn't 'Just for kids', it's a whole-ass ART FORM.

[fourteenpigs]

PLEASE DO!!! He’s a fursona from 2008 made by Emma essex who was featured in their music project called vulpvibes which was then called lapfox trax but is now currently called halleylabs and is still an active project to this day,,,

Here’s some wacky trax

Vulpvibes

Lapfox trax

Halleylabs

Theyre ALSO Famous for these hit jams… you’ve heard these around the internet (can’t add anymore oops)

Hyperfixation so bad people think of me when they see it

[xaphii]

Can you imagine Solas having one spy in the Inquisition whose job is to SPECIFICALLY keep tabs on Inquisitor Lavellan, and it's pretty easy because they're an elf so yadayada kinship so the agent manages to get good rapour with inky (not like friends or anything but they get along as much as fake-employee and boss can get along) and it's fairly easy to keep tabs on her, and when the agent has a moment to get back to the lighthouse to report in they're ready to answer the standard questions "what is her focus" "where is she allocating troups" "how is she going look for Solas" etc and instead Solas is just like "what's she reading right now?" "Is she eating okay?" "Has she lost any weight?" "Are the others supporting her?" And the agent is just like...?? "I... don't know?" And Solas starts swearing in ancient elvhen and throwing furniture so the agent gets the f out of there before they get FIRED and heads back to skyhold and manages to like fake an injury or something and get reasigned to the kitchens or something similar and starts keeping tabs on all the previous stuff and then finally when they next get back to the lighthouse and can respond to the questions this time (she's not reading a lot but she does have a book of dalish fables by her bed, she doesn't eat a lot, the cooks have made comment on her loosing weight, she seems to be distancing herself from the group (overheard from Varric and Dorian)) and solas is just like "thank you, you can go" and the agent just walks out of the office a bit flabbergasted, like they guess it's an improvement but wth? and they've only just shut the door and suddenly they can hear VIOLENT sobbing and MORE throwing of furniture and they're like "okay wtf is going on" and another agent is like "oh you didn't know?" And then the agent finds out THEY were doing it and every agent Solas has put on her keeps quitting cos spying on the leader of a religious army for her god ex-boyfriend is the worst gig ever

[meerey]

I'd like to take a moment to call out some extremely questionable behavior I've noticed over the years in the F1 fandom on tumblr, and more specifically, in the Lewis Hamilton fandom, from people who have gathered a large following due to their so called "race reviews" that focused mainly on Lewis and pointing out everything he was doing wrong both personally and professionally(according to their opinion as a psychologist)

The racially charged undertones, the microagressions, the talks of paranoia and insecurity, the psychoanalysis of his own father, discussions about being toxic and manipulative to his white coworker(who is always well balanced mentally while he is busy being paranoid and playing mind games) are all just normal OpiNiONs to have on THE ONLY BLACK DRIVER on the grid.

Thoughts and opinions that don't stop them from sexualizing him, though.

As per their own words when called out on it, we should all block and move on to not see it instead of calling it out, as everyone is entitled to their racist, deranged opinions.

Everyone engaging with this buffoonery and dehumanization needs to sit down and reflect about how damaging it all is, especially as a Lewis fan

[lazzerot]

We had a discussion about that in the group chat recently and I said another friend (not in said group chat) thinks it's funny that I refuse to follow tumblr blogs who indicate their astrological signs. Maybe it is, but I'm being serious: astrology is in the same category as "DNIs" to me; a surefire way to keep me a solar system away from your blog.

Maybe growing up with a friend who was basically a year younger than me but had the same (western) astrological sign as me and was the polar opposite of me personality-wise and yet we always got the same horoscope (which she STILL wanted to read for some reason) radicalized me, idk.

I really shouldn't be talking about this, who even cares, I'm procrastinating.

Also I was super into astronomy as a kid which I think automatically puts you at odds with astrology and the people who believe in it.

it does still make me insane specifically how many queer people lovingly embrace astrology. I went to a poetry workshop yesterday that was genuinely quite good but also included an option to disclose astrology designations during introductions and so many people broke out some variation of "I'm a [x] sum but I have a [y] placement and it SHOWS" girl no it doesn't. that's meaningless correlation you completely invented the causation

[8bitchmain]

some L&L fans r pissing me off so imma say it

STOP WHINING ABOUT L&L NOT GETTING SCREENTIME OMFG. THEYRE NOT THE ONLY ONE IN THE GAME YK.

[ghostlyfroggy]

If I say I am aroace and have had a boyfriend I am invalid because I have been in a romantic relationship.

If I had said I was aroace when I had a boyfriend I was invalid because I was seeing someone and just wanted attention.

If I had said I was aroace before I had dated I was invalid because I had never 'tried someone out'.

If I will never be valid to you, then why should I care? I don't have to explain my identity to you. I am just another messed up person trying to figure out a messed up world.

You are valid, always have been, always will be.