#social media boundaries

[unplugwell]

Social Media Influencer: Benefits of Social Media Break for a year

A social media influencer shares the benefits of taking a year-long break from social media, including improved mental health, creativity, and relationships.

[faeryfrogs]

SOME ADVICE from a journalist ("professional witness") I know:

Want to be aware but not overwhelmed?

Dedicate a specific time of day/week to consume this information, and to do it with awareness.

That means: don't just passively scroll the headlines if you can help it. Think about and engage with news.

(On here I have a BUNCH of current events related tags blocked, because tumblr relaxation time is NOT depressing current events information consumption time. Occasionally there will be bleed through, especially because I know some people are big into sharing calls to action on this platform and it is part of tumblr and overall social media culture, but you can opt out of it with blocked keywords and tags. Doing so doesn't make you an awful person ignoring the ills of the world, it makes you a person with boundaries.)

When it's your time to engage, do so with purpose. That means reading the article in full (not just the comments section, my god), and paying attention when you're watching something. Don't be on two screens at once. Lean into your curiosity and moral outrage when it's time to do so.

It's worth paying attention, it's worth knowing what's going on around you and in the world at large and discussing it with your friends/community. So don't dilute or divide your attention! It's important to be informed, to serve as a witness.

Do yourself a favor and curate your social media habits accordingly, and you'll find yourself a whole lot less off balance.

[shreeisspecial]

Navigating relationships in the modern world can be both exhilarating and challenging. With evolving societal norms, increased access to technology, and shifting gender roles, modern women face unique dynamics in their personal and romantic lives. This blog will provide practical advice for modern women on how to build and maintain healthy, fulfilling relationships.

[thepeacefulgarden]

Stay informed, but resist the urge to doomscroll, or to stay glued to the news all day/night long. Get your news from actual news sources, not social media. (This is an important strategy to prevent misinformation and disinformation.) It's okay to take a step back from the news, turn off the push notifications, etc. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you're callous/selfish/a bad person/etc. Your brain was simply not meant to handle everything, everywhere, all at once. (And that's true no matter how privileged you are or aren't.) It's okay to use Tumblr for fun, or for other non-activism-related things. (Same with any other social media site you use.) It's okay to not devote every waking minute to activism. In fact, it's good to take a break every now and then, for the sake of your mental and emotional well-being. And with that...

Please, please, please take care of yourself. Make sure you're eating and drinking water, getting rest and sleep, showering, taking your meds, checking in with your support system, etc. etc. etc. The causes you're fighting for need the best of you, not the rest of you...and more importantly, you need the best of you. You are your most important ally. Rest and self-care are not rewards for success, and they are not selfish, or frivolous indulgences. They are absolute necessities, and they are part of the work. Think of them as an act of defiance against the people, the forces, and the systems that want you to disappear, or to burn out and give up.

[nicollekidman]

the thing with chappell is that it’s important to be principled, it’s admirable to be outspoken, it’s a good thing that she’s saying what she’s saying in the space that she’s in. but you can’t be those things and also unprepared and unable to take care of yourself when your chosen profession is Public Person. i’ve never disagreed with anything she’s said but if she keeps taking it this hard then her team needs to figure out a way to change the way she currently operates otherwise her career is going to be short and have longterm damage

[usertoxicyaoi]

found this super interesting. this person below is an acting coach and scriptwriter that's worked on/working on: kinnporsche (2022), only friends (2023), playboyy (2023) and mansruang (2023):

[justthedismount]

The more I see of these gymnasts on social media the more I appreciate Jade's unwillingness to engage with any of it

[yesterdayiwrote]

Just as a PSA, and because its now a little bit more relevant, projecting pregnancy on to real life couples isn't cute and funny, it's parasocial, rude and intrusive. "X & Y Next!!" "When will [insert couple] have a baby?!" "You should be parents!!!" No, fuck off. Stop being weird.

[crazycatsiren]

Some of y'all on here have got to remember that people online are still people. You wouldn't go up to strangers walking down the street and start asking them personal information questions? Then don't do it to strangers on social media. It's no less creepy and invasive.

[clockw0rkvaudeville]

Reminder that it is OK to block a ship tag for any reason even if it’s popular or canon or your friends like it, or anything really. Block any tags you want, you don’t have to conform your fandom experience to what anyone else thinks is best.

[whereserpentswalk]

Ttrpg safety tools and the dog test

A quick rundown of what safety tools are: tools for setting boundaries in ttrpgs. Can be useful to some people, but often used really wrongly, and often seem overly gamey to me personally. It's like therapy speak for rpgs. And is similary used by the people it was meant to be used against.

One of the most common examples of these is the X card. The X card is a card with the letter X written on it. It sounds like a good idea if you've never interacted with people before. The X card is a boundary where one of the rules is you can't talk about the boundary. It's very useful for anyone who want to weaponize it, and not very useful for asserting actual boundaries.

There is also a type of chud who dislikes the the idea of safety tools because they think they're "woke". The only way to have a productive conversation around safety tools is to ignore them. Bad faith questions don't deserve good faith answers.

Now, a lot of people would think that its easier for a player to step out then deleate a scene. But a lot the culture around safety tools is based on this toxic highschool mindset around ttrpgs where someone feels like they both have a right, and a duty to be at every single momment of every session, and everyone else does to. So every single safety tool you'll see will assume the of lack the option of leaving the table at all. Being able to leave at any time is the ultimate boundary in ttrpgs and many other safety tools are attempting the impossible task of establishing boundaries without it. People compare them to safe words in bdsm. But it's like trying to create a safe word system but you have to cum and can't take breaks.

See part of the problem is 4chan and reddit have cultures of rpg horror stories. Which are useally lies. I'm not going to say fiction because that implies a relationship with the audience that they don't have. And these lies almost always have queer people, ND people, leftists, and anyone you'd see called a degenerate or weirdo as villains. While the type of nerd that Scott Pilgrim was the first book makes himself out to be a hero. And reddit also happens to be where the concept of safety tools was popularized.

It's this problem where people aren't trying to deal with actual triggers, they're trying to police content they morally condemn. R/rpg horror stories is the home of people who consider themselves outcasts for liking star wars and then have a deep fear of a marginalized person or someone from a slightly less mainstream subculture showing up at their table. And when they're the ones defining what a boundary conflict in rpg space looks like it's useally pretty bad. When a lot of safety tools go bad it's the case of weapons made to catch monsters being bad at dealing with humans.

And beyond all that. Beyond the specifics of rpg horror stories and it's influence. The way people talk about safety tools is mostly about removing content they deem objectionable from ttrpgs. When people talk about the X card and things like it, they're useally afraid someone will talk about something taboo and the table, and want a way to stop them, with the assumption that the rest of the party agrees. The extreme nature of how much someone has the power to censor, is brought with the assumption that what will be censored won't just violate their personal boundaries, but a community sense of morals.

They don't just want their triggers removed, they want things they deem immoral to be removed (not everyone who uses safety tools of course, but the hoard of bearded cishet white men who play 5e who dominate the conversation on them). That's just what a lot of the conversation around safety tools always comes down to. When somebody says they want safety tools to remove torture scenes or sex scenes from their table, it's not their personal triggers, its that they don't believe these things belong in the medium at all. They don't imagine what it would be like to be the only person in the room with their trigger, because the narrative they've created with problem players and safety tools, has made it so they assume the majority of the room shares their boundaries. Safety tools as they exist and are talked about are not built for a minority of players to be able to assert boundaries agaisnt the majority of players.

The dog test: so basically, while safety tools in ttrpgs have good reasons to exist, a lot of the time they're weapons players use to remove content they deem immoral. So often every discussion around things like the X card comes with a lot of moral condemnation, and assumptions about what content can ever be triggering vs what is ok. And this culture of moral condemnations can make safety tools especially dangerous for queer people and ND people, or just members of certain subcultures.

So I've developed the dog test. The dog test, is an example used to test if a safety tool (or more commonly someone talking about them) wants boundaries or wants moral policing. The dog test is simply to see how the safety tool is viewed if it's used to remove dogs from a game. Basically taking the commonly used examples like blood, or sex, and replacing them with the existence of dogs. Perhaps to add to it let's say the only case this hypothetical person will be ok with dogs is if they're killable enemies. This isn't unrealistic, a lot of people have trauma from dog bites, it's probably more likely to be a good faith trauma than a lot of the examples.

If they person is as willing to work with the needs of a player who has trauma around dogs as they are more sympathetic triggers than they've passed the dog test.

Disclaimer. A lot of these thoughts were developed in a discord conversation with @dragonpurrs and a lot of these words were originally things I said to it.

[yellowmanula]

Today, a certain poet sent me a suggestion to write a collaborative poem that imitates intimacy 🤢. Maybe I've finally been driven to the edge, but I've deleted photos from Facebook that seem to be considered "controversial" or an "invitation" to flirt or something more by certain individuals there. I’ve written repeatedly that these photos are my personal expression, a way to process trauma, and an attempt to reclaim femininity in a patriarchal world. Yet, some men seem completely indifferent to this; instead, they either insult me, aggressively attack, give unsolicited advice on my image, or send inappropriate messages privately.

To all my photo critics—rejoice! Now, let’s all nicely cover up in turtlenecks and say a prayer (no offense to my believing friends, but this ultimately leads to control and hysterical reactions to the human body).

That’s all for now about Facebook. For now, I’m glad to still have a small space for freedom here.

[arihi]

I won’t go as far as to say sadness is self-obsession, but I will say that the most helpful thing my futureme letters did was create little snapshots into the past that I would read a whole year in the future and 1) hold empathy for, 2) realize that whatever was tearing me apart back then really wasn’t that big of a deal, and 3) honestly cringe a little at it. And that’s okay! Maybe I was super dramatic over this friend whose name I now barely remember. I was so worried about dropping this one uni class (that I read years in the future when I was already in law school). I was so wrapped up in myself that I couldn’t see a way out of the sad hole/spiral I flung myself into for no reason. So wrapped up in myself that I didn’t think of a me post-handling the issue. Maybe I was really sad and upset and I had a good reason to be, but maybe-not-maybe, maybe-for-real even, things wound up working out.

And maybe things I’m stressed and upset about now will wind up working out. Maybe this is a silly story or cute (in a slightly pitiful way) memory for a future version of myself. I know it’s of little comfort in the moment when you’re going through anxieties, but so much fretting comes out of stretching ourselves thin, into shapes and boxes that are really and genuinely not real, but when that clicks in your brain for the first time a lot of things start getting better.

Anyway this was going to be my Twitter post of the day but the character limit is so fucking small and here I can also ramble in the tags, so.

[thepeacefulgarden]

[autumngremlin]

Random shifters on Tumblr: shifttok is so stupid. Theres so much misinfo and *insert other complaints that keeps getting repeated*

Me, a shifter that originally started on tiktok (and cant keep their fyp consistent bc their neurospicy brain can't focus on one thing): Ooh that cake looks pretty!

I want my soul to look like this cake

No but seriously I hardly see shifting content on tiktok unless it's my moots posting their art or have chosen to follow (which is very few now) so I just grimace whenever people post stuff like that on shiftblr bc it reminds me of my own early shifting days where I didn't know shit and only wanted to see pretty art. I only got exposed to "bad stuff" because I once followed a ton of "popular" creators back in the day. And gradually unfollowed because of drama between people or they're zionist

TLDR:

Keep in mind that you'll see stuff you interact with or choose to follow. Not everyone on there is "from a cult" as I've seen a select few say. Nobody's forcing you to engage other than your own algorithm. Block and move on like you do on here. It's not that different from any other social media. The echo chamber that keeps going on shiftblr is near equal toxicity as antishifters on tiktok. Do better

[spacedadsupport]

Jean-Luc Picard @SpaceDadSupport Turning off the ability for all and sundry to comment on your social media posts is an act of self care. 4:36 PM · Nov 6, 2024