#this post was inspired by a meme i saw on facebook about community from an episode which kirk fox was in

[queerinigo]

if they're gonna keep making remakes of every movie, can we at least get creative about it? remake the parent trap with con o'neill and kirk fox as the twins

[trippin-over-my-fandoms]

I’ve seen this done before but here are my modern!rdr2 social media headcanons for the Van der Linde gang.

some of these are LONG and then some are shorter. doesn’t mean I love any of them any less however. I just did my best with all of them. 

* I treat the gang as family especially for my modern au 

Dutch

frequently uses Facebook and has dozens of friends he doesn’t even know. like if he gets a friend request he’ll accept it. John tells him he might as well just make his page public and Arthur pleads with him to make a facebook PAGE so that his random friends will stop liking posts that Arthur tags Dutch in. 

Dutch has no idea how to make a facebook page. 

he also has a Twitter and a massive following at that. He’s VERIFIED. 

all of his twitter posts are vague though

are they a joke? are they political? is it what he’s eating for lunch that day? literally no one knows.

Hosea

also has facebook but doesn’t use it because why does he need to look at pictures of events he was at. he only uses it to see things he didn’t partake in

also has snapchat but just to keep up with the kids 

because life360 was too much to deal with for everyone

and snapchat is cool

also he can and will spam you with bitmojis 

Arthur

used to use facebook a lot but stopped because he was tired of his posts getting likes from people he didn’t know and friend requests from people Dutch was friends with. 

plEASE

he has a private facebook for a reason, he doesn’t want other people to know his business. 

he also has an instagram but anything he posts on facebook also goes on there. it’s not aesthetic or pretty or anything and he doesn’t even caption over half his pictures. 

he literally only uses social media so that his friends and family know he’s alive

has snapchat because of Hosea but barely knows how to use it 

doesn’t get why everyone wants to use snapchat when teXTING AND CALLING ARE RIGHT THERE

John

the question is what doesn’t he have.

john has been trying to make it big on social media since youtube came out.

his youtube used to have videos on it but he deleted them because they were cringy and arthur liked to send them to the group text. 

plays twitch games on the weekends and sometimes with Jack but he thinks most of the subscribers are there for his kid since most of his solo streams don’t do as well

has a twitter, doesn’t follow Dutch, literally envies that he’s verified. 

he’s tried everything but no matter what he does nothing pans out

uses tiktok to promote twitch streams

instagram feed is mostly selfies of him but 99.9% of the time he’s wearing sunglasses and the caption is some random quote 

also has facebook but only to appease Arthur and Dutch, he doesn’t even have a profile picture. Claims only boomers use it. 

an avid reddit user. if he’s got problems he’ll go to reddit. claims reddit saved his life. everyone’s tired of the story so they stopped asking. 

also uses snapchat more than he should and the only social platform he has more than 100 followers on. 

Charles

same as arthur and has both facebook and instagram and posts the same on both except his are pleasing to look at. 

they’re unintentionally aesthetic 

he uses a psd on all his pictures and won’t share what it is

has monthly life updates that start with some inspirational or deep quote and then text that pushes the instagram word limit

also has a deviantart , has shared psds there before , constantly tries to convince Arthur to get it. 

used to use tumblr but he forgot about it

Abigail

the definition of a facebook mom. 80% of her facebook posts are about Jack or parenting. 

Instagram is similar but also different, she’s actually a relatively successful influencer with over 1,000 followers. 

all of her friends and family (who have instagram) follow her

has snapchat solely for the cute bitmojis and to send John adorable snaps of Jack playing with all the fun filters. 

she also won’t take a selfie unless it’s with snapchat because she no longer trusts her own camera. 

also uses pinterest and has a collaborative board with all the ladies. 

but in general, on her own, she has too many boards. she uses pinterest for EVERYTHING 

Sadie

bold of you to assume she uses social media. 

she does just not a whole lot. 

checks it once in the morning and once at night. 

except pinterest because how dare Abigail get her into it. but even pinterest she only uses in downtime. 

has facebook and instagram but there’s maybe only five posts.

if anything she’ll post on her story

will only snap Abigail and Arthur otherwise she doesn’t use snapchat

all of the social apps are mostly offloaded on her phone anyways

if she needs to know anything she just checks the group text which she has on do not disturb because they text way too much. 

Molly

she’s verified on instagram 

it’s also the only social platform she’ll use, which frustrates Dutch because he wants to be friends with her on facebook

but she’s happy with just instagram 

she keeps it simple 

and the main theme to her posts are fun outfits in her ever expanding closet

the other posts are usually of plants that she’s managed to grow. she’s not the best at being a plant mom but she’s still a good one to the ones she’s managed to keep alive. 

the only thing she contributes to the pinterest board are her own pictures of her plants which are overly aesthetic. 

Karen

started out with a normal instagram account then made a spam account which she ended up using way more often.

all of her posts are extremely chaotic

and usually reposts from her snapchat

has a reddit just to troll John

reposted his cringy youtube videos to reddit and got hundreds of upvotes

if you wanna see the most raw and chaotic videos of Arthur and John then she’s the one to follow. 

also if you wanna see Abigail when she’s not all put together. 

is the reason there’s so many memes in the collaborative pinterest board

Mary-Beth

has a instagram but also has a second instagram for art and book reviews

or basically anything she’d post on her tumblr

which is her second most used social

also uses facebook but only because she is an admin for one of those multifandom blogs. 

also begs Arthur to get a deviantart. 

uses pinterest most but only second to Abigail

literally the queen of pinterest DIYs

Micah

has twitter

as far as anyone else knows that’s all he has

maybe he has snapchat?

maybe they saw him on snapmaps once? 

all he ever does with twitter though is retweet anything Dutch posts.

yet somehow he has so many followers. 

Lenny

anyone who has snapchat has streaks with Lenny

even Hosea who doesn’t understand why it’s a thing

he also posts a lot on facebook but it’s mostly travel or vacation photos everyone is just a tad jealous of. 

Lenny always seems to be busy but still has time for streaks with his friends. 

he’s also an up and coming youtube vlogger

Sean

also has reddit to troll john

but he also legitimately uses it too. 

he’s also really popular in the minecraft subreddit , don’t ask

also has twitch and also has way more subsribers than John

and a youtube which he’ll upload (overly edited) twitch streams to

everyone subscribes to him but they don’t tell John that.

also has a tiktok and is up to date on all the trends because of course he is

Kieran

got facebook when he was 10 and just never left.

literally doesn’t use any other social media

he’s not in the group text either so he has to facebook message Arthur to know what’s going on. 

but he shares a lot of memes and cute pictures of animals

he used to follow Dutch but unfriended him when he was the only thing he ever had on his activity feed. 

Susan

has facebook but claims she doesn’t have time to use it

Arthur knows this to not be true because she will like a lot of his posts. 

she’s also guilty of liking every single picture in one post or album. 

Arthur has also caught her looking at memes and using recipes she finds on there. 

also part of the pinterest board but never contributes. 

Trelawny

he has an account for everything

like

litereally

everything. 

even whatsapp and linked in and kik

even tinder

the only one anyone knows about are his facebook, twitter, and instagam

but there’s no posts on any of them except twitter

he’s also verified

but for unknown reasons

any posts on his facebook are ones he’s tagged in

he’s also in a lot of facebook groups

Strauss

runs a subreddit

a paid facebook admin of several pages

the only person who actually knows this is Dutch because Strauss has told him about it

he has no online presence whatsoever out side of those.

Javier

spotify king

has over 500,000 subscribers on youtube

uses instagram but as another platform for his music

edits his own album covers

top tier playlists too

Tilly

aesthetic queen

the most put together and pleasing to look at instagram feed next to Charles. 

uses pinterest a lot as inspiration and for making moodboards.

also uses tumblr to share moodboards

part of the sims global community facebook group

she keeps saying she’s going to start a youtube vlog but hasn’t yet

keeps trying to convince John to let her help him with his youtube.

she also uses twitch to play minecraft and sims

oh and she set up a minecraft server for everyone

Bill

facebook boomer

that’s it

I don’t know how else to put it

probably shares heavily republican posts

Swanson

didn’t use social media until tiktok.

he doesn’t do dances or anything but he does post weirdly obscure and chaotic videos that end up trending on more than one occasion

it’s usually drunk ramblings in his car that end up being hilarious

or videos of the others almost dying or ending up in the ER

Pearson

facebook boomer but make it cool.

also shares conservative posts but less offensive ones compared to Bill’s

likes almost every post any of his friends share

also comments on them too

Uncle

does he have social media? no one knows for sure. 

yet somehow he knows what’s going on

even if nobody can find any of his social accounts or have ever seen him using one before let alone doing anything on his phone other than playing cheesy mobile games.

[short-wooloo]

Historical Context, by Atun-Shei Films

(not mine, youtuber’s history lesson in the community tab, link at the bottom)

I will never make a video about this (I really should have included it in the black Confederates episode of Checkmate Lincolnites, but oh well) so a mini-essay will have to do.

I recently came across a pro-Confederate Facebook post featuring this quote from Confederate major general Patrick Cleburne, written on January 2, 1864:

"It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all.  Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties."

Now, I'm not going to share the post itself, as that would inevitably lead to doxxing and bullying. However, this is a teachable moment, a classic example of the beloved Lost Causer past-time of divorcing quotes from their important contexts.

You need to keep a couple things in mind when considering a historical quote. Who is the speaker? Who are they talking to? Do they have an objective in mind? What events surrounding this person, if any, have inspired them to say this particular thing at this particular time?

Quotes by themselves are useless in historical education and can often be misleading. I see y'all making this mistake with the Cornerstone Speech all the time – it's not the mic drop you think it is. You can't just shove it in someone's face and call it a day. If you really want to change minds, you need to present it in its proper context and alongside other evidence. Only then can you craft a complete and compelling argument.

Now as it happens, Alexander Stephens was totally sincere when he called late 18th century notions of racial equality "wrong," and he spoke for the overwhelming majority of Confederate true believers in the Spring of 1861 when he said that "our new government is founded on exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the [black man] is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." But without context, how would I know that? When making an argument, the onus of proof is on you.

This particular pro-Confederate post presented the Cleburne quote by itself in meme format without any context whatsoever, so allow me to provide one. At first glance, it seems like Cleburne is espousing anti-authoritarian values. It seems like he is declaring, clearly and definitively, that the Southern states did not secede to preserve slavery, but rather to uphold their regional self-determination.

This quote is from a letter Cleburne wrote to Joseph E. Johnston, his commanding officer in the Army of Tennessee, proposing that the Confederate government emancipate and arm the South's enslaved men to bolster the thinning ranks of the army. [1] As you may remember from Checkmate Lincolnites, this proposal was met with shock and horror from the Confederate leadership, who quickly rejected it.

But Cleburne saw further than them. He believed – correctly – that unless something drastic was done, the Confederacy was doomed to destruction. As he writes in the proposal, "Instead of standing defiantly on the borders of our territory or harassing those of the enemy, we are hemmed in to-day into less than two-thirds of it, and still the enemy menacingly confronts us at every point with superior forces."

"If this state continues much longer we must be subjugated," he continues. Defeat would inevitably lead to "the loss of all we now hold most sacred — slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood."

As Claiborne sat down to write this proposal, exactly one year had passed since the Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Though a huge risk, and deeply unpopular with many Northern whites, the edict proved to be a political masterstroke that crippled the Confederate States' ability to wage war.

Namely, it mobilized the growing abolitionist movement in the North, encouraged resistance among Southern blacks, and stoked the ever-present white Southern paranoia of servile insurrection. As Cleburne says of the planter class, "The fear of their slaves is continually haunting them."

It sparked the formation of the United States Colored Troops and the first mass military enlistment of black men in American history. Their contribution to the United States' war effort was already making a difference in 1863, and it would eventually prove invaluable to victory. Lincoln himself mused late the following year that "any different policy in regard to the colored man deprives us of his help, and this is more than we can bear . . . Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it." [2]

Lincoln also damaged the Confederate government's relationship with the staunchly abolitionist British Empire. "Our country has already some friends in England," Cleburne writes, "but they cannot assist us without helping slavery, and to do this would be in conflict with their policy for the last quarter of a century."

Cleburne had come to believe that slavery, though "one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war," had become a military "weakness" and a political liability.

He fretted in particular about the Confederate army's dim prospects for future recruitment as the war dragged on. "Our single source of supply is that portion of our white men fit for duty and not now in the ranks," whereas "the President of the United States announces that 'he has already in training an army of 100,000 [black men] as good as any troops,' and every fresh raid he makes and new slice of territory he wrests from us will add to this force."

He emphasizes twice that his issue with slavery was strictly from "a military point of view," to placate Johnston and his fellow officers, who were – like just about all Confederates – rabidly pro-slavery.

Anticipating fierce resistance from his colleagues, Cleburne addresses some common Confederate criticisms of his  unusual and radical proposal. "It is said Republicanism cannot exist without the institution [of slavery]," but, he argues, emancipation is preferable to defeat. "We prefer any form of government of which the Southern people may have the molding, to one forced upon us by a conqueror."

Here's where our quote shows up: in the litany of anticipated criticisms. "It is said" – not by Yankee propagandists, but by Confederates themselves – "slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all."

But Cleburne denies that slavery is his entire reason for fighting, as well he might. Political beliefs in the 1860s were as complex, intricate, and multifaceted as they are today. The moral issue of slavery was tied into legislative issues like state's rights and economic issues like free trade. Confederate soldiers fought for all of those causes, and for more lofty ideals like independence and resistance to invasion. But make no mistake: slavery was the lynchpin of the entire Confederate philosophy.

And Cleburne knew it. He was not a native Southerner, but an Irish immigrant, and sometimes outsiders have the clearest perspectives. He saw what his colleagues could not – the Confederacy was about to crash and burn, and arming slaves was perhaps the only way to avert total annihilation. He knew that it was not what the Confederate leadership wanted to hear, but nonetheless, "no objection ought to outweigh it which is not weightier than independence."

And yet – they rejected it anyway. They even suppressed the knowledge of it. [3]

Cleburne is not speaking for the Confederacy in this quote. He's demonstrating his uniqueness within that system, his break from the party line. So ironically, this quote does far more to reinforce the Confederacy's bone-deep commitment to slavery than to dispel it.

~REFERENCES~ [1] "Patrick Cleburne's Proposal to Arm Slaves," American Battlefield Trust https://www.battlefields.org/learn/pr...

[2] G. S. Borritt. Why the Confederacy Lost (1993). Oxford University Press, Page 137

[3] Kevin Levin. Searching for Black Confederates (2019). UNC Press, Page 57-60

https://www.youtube.com/post/UgyVM9ZsMb_cNkVvdvB4AaABCQ

[misszura]

Where, besides Tumblr, can people find you doing fannish things? (Obviously only mention sites and usernames you actually want to be found at. Don’t expose your secret identities on my account.)

What other names have you gone by on these platforms, including Tumblr, if any?

When did you join the IT fandom? And what got you into fandom, to begin with?

What are your favorite ships, or characters, if any, and why? What do they mean to you?

In what ways do you participate in fandom? (ex. Posting memes, reblogging/commenting on content, writing fanfic, making fanart, creating fanmixes, etc.)

Do you have any in-fandom inspirations? Other members of the community that drive you? (And if you have the time/energy, in what ways do they inspire you?)

Name and link some of your favorite works, please!

Do you have any works of your own that you feel particularly proud of, or wish more people would’ve consumed? Please provide links if possible.

Have you ever participated in a fannish event (ie. IT Week, a fic Big Bang) or applied to be a part of a fanzine? If so, which ones, and can you please link them?

Without any form of bashing or lashing out, what is something you feel this fandom is missing?

(lmao sorry I accidentally unfollowed trying to get to the ask button)

OMG, it's 2am here, and I just received this notification, so instead of watching the celling, trying to find sleep, I'll answer your questions !

(I love asking ! Thank you so much ! )

Others social medias that's it ? I have plenty of them. You can find me on twitter (@ CrazyZura) but it's mostly in french (speaking English in front of a buch of french people is hard y'know ?) I have Instagram, but it's not really interesting (except if watching me make paper boats and leave them at my university is interesting) I think it's resophinement (I'll check before posting) I also have wattpad, but as before it's in french (feel free to have a look on my unfinished works (no It there)) still CrazyZura, but I have a second account where I project to post the fanfiction I'm currently writing ! (I'm almost done ! ) Oh and I have a tik tok account ! I draw a lot, and there is some IT content there certainly CrazyZura (as @ but I think my username us wawawa, because I used to cosplay a gebderbend Wario) (don't ask he is underrated XD)

I never changed my username on those platforms, because I'm kinda a newbe on Internet, i mean, I'm here from 2015 for most of them, before I was on... YouTube i think, and Facebook. I used to have a blog, and my username was something like sosodu44 (my name + from my department) (and I'm on Tumblr for 2/3 months, I still don't know how it works)

(please tell me i understood well the question, sorry if not, I still learning foreign languages)

I'm also a newbe on the IT fandom since I watched them (2017 and 2019 version) during the lockdown, and the 1990 miniseries not long after. I'm still looking for the book, but I can't find any book shop open (and I won't buy it with Amazon.) You laugh at me if I say that I saw those movies while watching the whole Finn Wolfhard filmography ? Because it's thanks to that I'm in the fandom

My favourite characters are Stan, Richie and Patrick, and my favourite ships are probably Stozier (don't hit me please) patrick X Richie, henpat and obviously Reddie (I mean, I think everyone in the fandom like Reddie, right ?) Why ? I kin (it's the term ? Let's say it's the term) Richie and Stan (more Richie, he is my Confort character ) and Patrick, because I have a thing with unsaine bad Guys, my family always make jokes about it. (I can't help, plus the fact that he is pictured by Owen teague improve my love for him) (funfact : patrick is my Confort drawing, when I don't know what draw, it end up by Patrick) (sometimes Vic comes, because i like his character a lot too)

I love this question, because it makes me feel like I'm really a part of something even if I don't do a lot. As said before I draw Patrick a lot, not only, I draw it characters a lot (I need to find where I put my last Bill drawing ) I also have a fanfiction, but I won't post it until it's finished, because I fear to not end it, and I don't want the pressure of people asking "when is the next chapter" (if people ask that) and I'm kinda anxious that if I start post it before I finish it, I'll never finish it... (But soon ! Like before July if I work hard !). And obviously I reblog memes, I share fanarts, cosplays, tik tok, videos, and fanfiction.

Ok so this is the "sophie is going to simp over everyone" time ! Fanfictions writers who inspires me are @ fuji09 (I didn't notify them on purpose, I have to stop bothering them) they're fanfictions are really cool, and there for every tastes, I wish I could have a writing skill as good as them. There is also my friend shayla_mitchel (on Wattpad) she writes a lot about Patrick and she Helps me a lot with my work (plus she is the one who correct the English version, since my translations aren't always the best) (by that I mean : it's sometimes, when the moon is in good therms with Neptune, good enough) (in my language it's fun. I swear) there are those Cosplayers on tik tok, mostly fezilius and Synthestron, moonshine4snails, tarondactyl and aphelion (they're cosplaying with their friends, if you have time watch they're works, even if they don't do only It contents, they're really good Cosplayers that I love) (i just noticed I've mentioned only male/nb Cosplayers, so I add cospla.natro (on Instagram and tik tok) and Ligeia.cosplay (on Instagram and tik tok too) and there is also the reddie videos of kmcarras (on Instagram)

I still don't know how to put links in her (I'll try to figure out while answering) the leach series of Fuji09 (mentioned above) on AO3. A fic called When you say my name by YoungDumbandFullofHeadcanons on AO3 (really a jewelry, but a lot of tw, mostly of transphobia, be careful and take care) and a hard one called "a lot of marshmallow" by MeganRosenberg on AO3 (apparently) kinda hard because it's a violent one. There was others like Above and bellows (I think) i can't find it back to mention, I think the author deleted it.

I'm really proud of the fonction I'm currently writing, even if it's a fiction with an OC and I'm a little ashamed of that(because people judge that a lot). (As said before not posted yet) and my tik toks about Richie and patrick (the two last I've posted.

It's now 3am, and I haven't finished, my phone Will probably get out of power before the end XD (like this I'll see if Tumblr have some automatics saves)

I wish I would, but no... One day, may be if the occasion comes to me :)

I don't really know, I wish we had more content (in french for exemple ! ) But I think the fandom is kinda cool (when we forget all the ship wars and all dramas like this)

I hope I've answered well enough, I'll probably regret doing this that late tomorrow, because I probably forget a lot of things (did i mentioned that i made some It incorrects ? I don't think so) keep asking me things I'm totally open for this (idk if annon are on)

On this, I wish you a good night, or day, or whenever you are and I'm going to keep watching my celling !

Good night 🍈🍈🍈

[lycorogue]

A Family Tradition: Giving Thanks Tree

Tina Belcher - Image care of “Bob’s Burgers” on Fox

When I was a kid - I can’t even remember how old I first was - my mother would tape a cardboard cutout of a bare tree onto the attic door. Along its trunk were the words “Giving Thanks Tree”. She would then hang up a manila envelope filled with leaves cut out of red, orange, and yellow construction paper. Our goal for the month of November, leading into Thanksgiving? Write just one thing we’re thankful for each day and then hang it up on the cardboard tree so it is full by the end of the month.

As a child I HATED this tradition. It was so hard for me to think of 30 unique things I was grateful for, and usually ended up with generic things like “food” or “a home” or “boys” (I was a bit like Tina there). It wasn’t until college did I truly get the value of taking a few minutes each day to think about a blessing in your life you may have otherwise taken for granted. It was hard for me my freshman year of college to know I couldn’t participate in the family Giving Thanks Tree, so, with a new appreciation for the tradition, I made my own cardboard tree, hung it on my dorm room door, posted a sign explaining the tradition, and put out my own envelope of paper leaves for my floormates to join in. I was a naïve 18yo, but thankfully no one posted joke leaves. I was surprised at how many joined in on my tradition as I filled my tree with gratitudes. (I later brought my leaves home to post on the family tree).

In 2011 I got married and officially moved out of my mother’s home. I have yet to find a good wall or door to hang a big ol’ cardboard tree, so instead I switched to a digital list. This year I had decided to share to more than my personal Facebook page. I tried posting daily on Twitter as a month-long thread, but... well, it didn’t go so well, so I stopped after day 13, I think. I did finish the thread over on Facebook, and I decided to bring the complete list over to Tumblr.

So, for any who are interested, below the break is my list of 30 things I was grateful for this past November; things I hope to remain grateful for well beyond the next year. Always remember to stop to count your blessings. If you really try to find them, you will discover you have more than you might have realized.

1. I am grateful that my friends and family have been (mostly) safe and healthy this year, and that those who did contract COVID-19 were able to recover. ❤ (*proceeds to knock on wood*)

2. I am grateful for the amazing support system I have. I know I am one of the lucky ones, but between my husband, my family, my friends, and even my readers, I have so much positivity lifting me up, and I want to make sure I never take that for granted.

3. I am grateful to have a stable roof over my head. It's a decent size for two people (we just have a LOT of things). It has sturdy walls & a secure roof. We can keep it warm in the winter and cool in the summer (not cool enough for Hubby, but nothing outside a meat locker would be). We have an attentive but not intrusive landlady. She repairs anything that needs fixing ASAP, and is a lovely woman we can just pal around with on occasion. Those are things I know a lot of people can't say about their landlords/ladies. We also have welcoming neighbors that are a joy to run into in the parking lot. If we have to be "stuck" somewhere until we can buy our own place, where we are works wonderfully.

4. I am grateful that we are no longer hurting for money. We can splurge on smaller purchases (under $50) without much second thought. We can now pay off ALL of our monthly bills after just the first paychecks of the month. And then the rest of the month is building up funds for the next month's bills and savings. Speaking of, we have a little nest-egg of a couple grand, which is still relatively new for us. I'm also over-paying my student loans and car payment. Not by much, but enough that my bills are a couple months ahead, so... cool. I know that during this year in particular, having any sort of financial security is hard to hold onto, so I want to count our blessings that we're doing alright. *proceeds to knock on wood again*

5. As silly as it seems to say, I am grateful for all of the election memes. It was a super stressful time for most of us, and to have some sort of humor that most of the country could relate to (such as Flash from Zootopia being in charge of counting Nevada's votes) was a great stress reliever and bringer of much-needed smiles. So, thank you, Meme Lords/meme creators for bringing us such fantastic content to help ease that wait and stress.

6. I am grateful to see that my Muse is slowly returning to me, like a groundhog after a long hibernation, poking its head out just enough to acknowledge it's there before scurrying back into its burrow to hide again. It hasn't been much, and only one story was actually written in November, but I have been playing with a handful of plotbunnies. It's nice to be able to de-stress via plot-building and playing with character growth again. 😊 ❤

7. I'm sure you all saw this coming, but I am grateful that T**** lost the election. Not so much that Biden/Harris won, because there's issues there too, but that T**** will be out of the White House. Mostly, I'm grateful because that means so many that I love - and those online personalities that I respect - are going to be in a safer America (and world) as of January 20th. For those who suffered through physical, mental, emotional, financial, and maybe even spiritual hardships over the past 4 years - both Americans and international citizens alike - I am grateful that you get to take a breath and relax (at least, for a little bit) now. I don't know if Biden/Harris will (or can) do anything to actually help heal what caused my loved ones' suffering, but at least they won't be actively adding to it.

8. Getting away from the political, I am grateful that Hubby and I can eat whenever we want (outside of work). We may grumble about what we have available, but that's mostly due to not having the energy to turn ingredients into meals, or we've had the same meal 3x in a row already. Regardless, we CAN eat whenever we are hungry, and I am grateful for that.

9. Keeping with the "things people can take for granted easily" theme, I am grateful for my wardrobe. It may be simple and repetitive, but it is enough to wear something clean each day for anywhere between 7 and 12 days before needing to run to the laundromat. Nothing has holes or ratty edges (unless it's a beloved shirt I refuse to give up). My shoes have good soles to them, and I rarely have sore feet. When my feet DO get repeatedly sore, I have the funds to either fix my shoes via new insoles, or I can simply buy new ones. My coats are warm and, aside from one missing the grip of the zipper (but the zipper itself still works), they are still in good condition. I may not be the most fashionable, and I'm sure I'm not picking the best clothing to fit my body shape, but over-all, I'm protected from the elements, my body is protected, and I am well-kempt.

10. Kept me too long to mention this, but I am grateful that I was able to marry my best friend. There are those out there still looking for companionship. There are those who found it, but, in some cruel twist of fate, lost it. There are those who love their spouse, but may not exactly be friends with them. And yet, here Hubby and I are: two people who would gladly spend every waking moment with each other. I found someone I could chat and cuddle and laugh and cry with every moment of every day. Someone I share interests with, and someone who expands my list of interests. Someone who also expands my view of the world; who makes me wish to be more understanding and accepting, and just... better. I am lucky, and I never want to see a day when I forget that fact.

11. I feel a bit silly with this one, but I am grateful I don't have any major allergies I have to worry about. Specifically, no food allergies. I've seen how difficult it is for people to navigate around food allergies or intense airborne allergies. To have to not think about those sorts of things is such a privilege, and I'm truly grateful for it. I have enough issues with lactose intolerance.

12. Another kinda silly one, but, I'm grateful for @dragnime​ living next door to us. Same was true for when another friend was our neighbor. There's just something about seeing dragnime’s car when I come home (again, same with the other friend and his car) that makes me smile. I don't have to actually socialize with dragnime that day if we're both busy, but to see his car and know he's there should I want to reach out is just a weird sort of comforting. (Man, I really need Hubby and I to win the lottery so we can build our commune already....)

13. I am grateful for publicly announced self-appointed deadlines. Last year I started up my own tradition within the Miraculous Ladybug fandom: Friday 13ths should be Plagg Appreciation Day. Plagg is a character who, I feel, doesn't get nearly enough love or screen time. He's also the kwami of bad luck and destruction, so... Friday 13th seemed fitting. The final bit of writing I had actually finished and posted prior to November was for this fandom holiday back in March, and at the end of that story I told everyone "see you in November!" so I felt silly if I'd let this poor-writing year defeat me. I was determined to have at least THIS story written, and that determination paid off. It ended up taking almost literally my entire day off, but I was able to become inspired enough to write SOMETHING, and it seems to be received well, so... added yay. 😊

14. I am grateful for my relatively easy life. I have been loved and supported my whole life. I never really experienced abuse or prejudice (or even really bullying) personally. I was able to fully experience college without much personal trouble (my student loan debt notwithstanding). Aside from a single 6-month stint right after moving to NY, I have been able to find work easily enough. I haven't had to struggle for food or clothing or housing (stretch budget, yes; struggle, no). I haven't had to live without electricity or clean running water. I've never lost loved ones or valuable items (even sentimentally) through natural disasters. *knock on wood some more* There have been struggles in my life, to be sure, but, on the whole, I've had a happy, safe, supported, and relatively easy life.

15. I'm calling out @chibisunnie​ specifically. I am so SO very grateful for her. I mean, I always am, but this year in particular she's been such a pillar of strength for me. I can't even imagine the stress and panic this year must cause her, and yet she's still always there to comfort ME. (I mean, I hope I comfort her too, but this year in particular I feel it's more her comforting me.) She's been the main one (right behind Hubby) to remind me to be kind to myself this year and that it IS an unusual year; my "failings" in 2020 don't define who I am seeing it's an outlier year.

16. I am grateful that my sister is seeing her true self-worth. She’s worked so hard to improve herself and to find out who she truly is, and it's been fantastic to see her continue to evolve. It's also great to see her find someone who builds her up, so a side bit of gratitude to her boyfriend. And, yes, her perseverance, strength, and determination (as well as her mad crocheting skills) are still things that I greatly admire in her. I'm just so happy and proud and grateful that she seems to be in such a good place. ❤

17. I am grateful that my mom has discovered how capable she truly is. This year has been undeniably hard on small businesses such as hers. It must be such a struggle to keep everything afloat and to stay positive, and yet she is. She's pushing herself to improve her business and marketing. She's dealing with modern technology – basically the bane of her existence – nearly all day long between Zoom meetings to network and learn and grow, to working remotely, to making videos to help promote herself, to reworking her business's website, etc. She's grown so much over the year and I'm so proud of her.

18. Since I mentioned it, I am grateful for video conference programs such as Zoom. Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts, exhaustion, and my right knee getting worse, I had to stop doing Zumba (I'm hoping to work my way back into the routine again sooner than later). However, before June screwed me over, Zoom was how I was able to keep up with this exercise routine post-shutdown. It's how I've been able to see my family. It's how so many have been able to continue working. It's how YouTubers I enjoy manage to still interact for their videos. It's fantastic that this technology is not only available, but it's also accessible to so many.

19. Speaking of which, I am grateful for the Oxboxtra crew, Dicebreaker, the Theory Family (yes, I’m aware people find MatPat problematic...), SuperCarlinBrothers, OSP, Hello Future Me, and The Warp Zone. In total, that’s nearly a dozen different YouTube channels I routinely watch – focused mostly on OutsideXbox, Outside Xtra, Film Theory, Game Theory, Food Theory, and SuperCarlinBrothers – and these channels have really helped me keep my sanity. The fandoms specifically for OutsideXbox, Outside Xtra, and SuperCarlinBrothers are just so sweet and supportive of even fellow fans. The YouTubers have such big hearts and are so delightfully goofy, it's almost like welcoming friends into my home whenever I watch them. I even started checking out stuff on Luke Westaway's and Ellen Rose's private channels on YouTube because I enjoyed these entertainers so much. So, thank you, YouTubers, for helping me find something that lets me forget what's going on in the world for 2hrs and just have fun. ❤

20. Along those lines, I am grateful for games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Among Us. Both of those games, and similar ones that were available this year, were great distractions from the chaos of 2020. They have provided fantastic and unique gameplay content for the YouTube channels I follow, which, in turn, provided great video content for me to watch. These types of games were also, and most importantly, great ways for people to stay connected. I've been able to bond and joke around and preoccupy myself with games and gaming streams, and they have certainly been such great lifelines.

21. I am grateful for quiet cuddle moments. Be it in the evening while Hubby and I are watching TV, or while we're actually snuggled in bed watching Disney+ or Netflix, or after hitting snooze in the morning and just wanting to stay cuddled together for another 5 minutes, or even when one of us (*cough*usuallyme*cough*) is feeling super stressed and we just take a couple-minute time-out to just hug, I am grateful for all of them. I know not every couple gets to have these physical contact moments for various reasons, add in my own experience of having an 8-year long-distance relationship, and I try so hard to not take those quiet moments of just simple hugs or hand holds or back scratches for granted.

22. I am grateful for music and the ability to experience it. It motivates me. It inspires me (I have so many stories/chapters written because a song made me think of the plot). It helps with cathartic release. It gets me moving and exercising. It keeps me focused. It allows me to just zone out. Music is just so important in my life and the life of so many more. Bless all the music creators and performers.

23. I am grateful for Anime Night. It's a bit of normalcy in this year of anything but. It's a way to stay connected with a couple of my friends, and the little bits of socializing we do outside of watching has really allowed me to get to know both men more, as well as learn more about the other people really important in their lives.

24. I am grateful for the experience of turning fans into friends (and also being allowed to evolve from fan to friend). One of the best things about fanfiction is the ability to see people interact and react with your work, and to then respond in kind. It's sort of a silver lining to the relatively small number of views and comments on most fanfiction (compared to most professionally published work, that is), since it means you aren't too overwhelmed to truly experience each comment, follow, fave, like, reblog, etc. Through people gushing about my work, and me gushing back at how happy they've made me, I've been able to build up some really sweet friendships. I've also made two new close-acquaintances (we don't interact QUITE enough to be “friends” just yet) from my own gushy reviews and their responses to how great my reviews made them feel. So, to @chibisunnie​, @thetauruspixie​, @livrever​, @tlos21​, @chanceuseladynoire​ and @zenmisery​ (I hope that's all of you), I am so grateful for the bond we've had over fanfiction. Love all of you so much! ❤

25. I am grateful for members of minorities and other marginalized peoples for taking the time and effort to try to educate others; making it easier on us when they are in no way obligated to help us understand at all (it's really on us to put in the effort to try to understand them). This year alone, via personal posts on social media, infographics, comics, people posting reference sheets of hotlinks to research/source materials, etc, I was able to learn so much. I was able to grow and try to overcome my own prejudices, misunderstandings, and misinformation. All because people decided to share their raw experiences or do the research for me. It was something each and every one of them volunteered to do in an effort to help educate, and I am so grateful for the lessons they've taught me.

26. I am grateful that people find me a safe person to talk to. It is one of the few things I want in life; to be a safe haven for friends, family, and even strangers who are hurting. I realize the amount of trust people put in me and the vulnerability they are allowing themselves. It is humbling, to say the least, but also such an amazing feeling. I will try to keep learning and keep growing to keep earning the trust warranted me being this safe haven, but in the meantime, I'll continue to be grateful that people do find me as someone they can be safe with.

27. On the flipside, I am grateful to have friends who allow me to just be who I am. I can be obsessed with a cartoon aimed at 10 year olds (Miraculous Ladybug), and my friends not only don't judge, but they also happily let me know when their young children start to enjoy the show! I can be goofy or forgetful or screw something up, and, again, there's no judgment. They just accept me as I am, and I am blessed.

28. I am grateful for the support my friends and family have (outside of me) in their lives. It does my heart well to know that even if I disappear due to my own mental health issues, that my friends and family still have great support around them. They are all kind people surrounded by more kind people, and I nearly cry whenever I read or hear about my friends getting support they need and the outpouring of support. YOU ARE ALL BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE AND I LOVE YOU ALL AND EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU DESERVE THE OUTPOURING OF SUPPORT YOU'VE FOUND. ❤

29. I am grateful for the continued bonding we've had with my sister-in-law this past year. I miss having the post-Zumba walk where we can just talk, but, largely through effort on her part, we've been having some time every Tuesday when she comes over to work after dropping the kids at school. We also had a whole evening with her on Black Friday. She's also texted and called a few times to chat, and we are getting closer and closer each year. Not everyone thinks of their in-laws as family despite what the law says, so I'm grateful that we have always thought of each other as family, and that we continue to bond and grow as siblings.

30. I am grateful for this family tradition. It allows me to really focus on what is important in life, and all the joys and blessings I've experienced. It's especially important during this trash heap of a year. I love that I can find silver linings in my life and appreciate what I have. This tradition is also a reminder to not take things for granted. I am so SO grateful that my mom introduced us to this tradition and forced us to participate as we grew up. It's a lesson that will stay with me, and it's such an important one. Thank you, Mom!

[newstfionline]

Monday, April 26, 2021

California ponders slow growth future (AP) In 1962, when California’s population of more than 17 million surpassed New York’s, Gov. Pat Brown celebrated by declaring a state holiday. In the coming days, when the U.S. Census Bureau is expected to release the state’s latest head count, there probably will be no celebrations. Over the past decade, California’s average annual population growth rate slipped to 0.06%—lower than at any time since at least 1900. The state is facing the prospect of losing a U.S. House seat for the first time in its history, while political rivals Texas and Florida add more residents and political clout. The reality behind the slowed growth isn’t complicated. Experts point to three major factors: declining birth rates; a long-standing trend of fewer people moving in from other states than leaving; and a drop in international immigration, particularly from Asia, which has made up for people moving to other states. California is in the throes of a yearslong housing crisis as building fails to keep up with demand, forcing more people onto the streets and making home ownership unattainable for many. The state has the nation’s highest poverty rate when housing is taken into account. Its water resources are consistently taxed, and the state has spent more than half of the past decade in drought. Freeways are jammed as more people move to the suburbs, and worsening wildfires are destroying homes and communities.

Armenians Celebrate Biden’s Genocide Declaration as Furious Turkey Summons US Ambassador (Newsweek) Armenia celebrated President Joe Biden’s recognition of the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I as genocide on Saturday, as Turkey summoned the U.S. ambassador and strongly condemned the move. In acknowledging of the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide, Biden went further than his predecessors in the White House after years of careful language on the issue. The move risks fracturing America’s relationship with Turkey, a longtime U.S. ally and NATO partner. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan sent Biden a letter praising his statement. Meanwhile, officials in Turkey quickly denounced Biden’s remarks and summoned the US Ambassador to Ankara. In a statement, Turkey said its foreign minister, Sedat Onal, has told ambassador David Satterfield that Biden’s remarks caused “wounds in ties that will be hard to repair.” Onal also reportedly told Satterfield that Turkey “rejected it, found it unacceptable and condemned in the strongest terms.”

Ahead of Geneva talks, Cypriots march for peace (Reuters) Thousands of Cypriots from both sides of a dividing line splitting their island marched for peace on Saturday, ahead of informal talks in Geneva next week on the future of negotiations. With some holding olive branches, people walked in the bright spring sunshine around the medieval walls circling the capital, Nicosia. The United Nations has called for informal talks of parties in the Cyprus dispute in Geneva on April 27-29, in an attempt to look for a way forward in resuming peace talks that collapsed in mid-2017. Prospects for progress appear slim, with each side sticking to their respective positions. Greek Cypriots say Cyprus should be reunited under a federal umbrella, citing relevant United Nations resolutions. The newly-elected Turkish Cypriot leader has called for a two-state resolution. Cyprus was split in a Turkish invasion in 1974 triggered by a brief Greek-inspired coup, though the seeds of separation were sown earlier, when a power-sharing administration crumbled in violence in 1963, just three years after independence from Britain.

World’s Biggest Covid Crisis Threatens Modi’s Grip on India (Bloomberg) As India recorded more than 234,000 new Covid-19 infections last Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held an election rally in the West Bengal town of Asansol and tweeted: “I’ve never seen such huge crowds.” The second wave of the coronavirus has since grown into a tsunami. India is now the global coronavirus hotspot, setting records for the world’s highest number of daily cases. Images of hospitals overflowing with the sick and dying are flooding social media, as medical staff and the public alike make desperate appeals for oxygen supplies. The political and financial capitals of New Delhi and Mumbai are in lockdown, with only the sound of ambulance sirens punctuating the quiet, but there’s a growing chorus of blame directed at Modi over his government’s handling of the pandemic. “At this crucial time he is fighting for votes and not against Covid,” said Panchanan Maharana, a community activist from the state of Odisha, who previously supported Modi’s policies but will now look for alternative parties to back. “He is failing to deliver—he should stop talking and focus on saving people’s lives and livelihoods.” Modi is seen by many as a polarizing leader whose brand of nationalism that promotes the dominance of Hindus has appalled and enraptured the nation. Whether the pandemic will dent his appeal remains unclear.

ASEAN leaders tell Myanmar coup general to end killings (AP) Southeast Asian leaders demanded an immediate end to killings and the release of political detainees in Myanmar in an emergency summit Saturday with its top general and coup leader who, according to Malaysia’s prime minister, did not reject them outright. The leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations also told Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing during the two-hour talks in Jakarta that a dialogue between contending parties in Myanmar should immediately start, with the help of ASEAN envoys. Daily shootings by police and soldiers since the Feb. 1 coup have killed more than 700 mostly peaceful protesters and bystanders, according to several independent tallies. The messages conveyed to Min Aung Hlaing were unusually blunt and could be seen as a breach of the conservative 10-nation bloc’s bedrock principle forbidding member states from interfering in each other’s affairs. But Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said that policy should not lead to inaction if a domestic situation “jeopardizes the peace, security, and stability of ASEAN and the wider region” and there is international clamor for resolute action.

Sunken missing Indonesian submarine found broken into pieces (Reuters) A missing Indonesian submarine has been found, broken into at least three parts, at the bottom of the Bali Sea, army and navy officials said on Sunday, as the president sent condolences to relatives of the 53 crew. Navy chief of staff Yudo Margono said the crew were not to blame for the accident and that the submarine did not experience a blackout, blaming “forces of nature”. A sonar scan on Saturday detected the submarine at 850 metres (2,790 feet), far beyond the Nanggala’s diving range.

At least 82 die in Baghdad COVID hospital fire (Reuters) A fire sparked by an oxygen tank explosion killed at least 82 people and injured 110 at a hospital in Baghdad that had been equipped to house COVID-19 patients, an Interior Ministry spokesman said on Sunday. “We urgently need to review safety measures at all hospitals to prevent such a painful incident from happening in future,” spokesman Khalid al-Muhanna told state television, announcing the toll.

Struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic, people turn to strangers online for help (Washington Post) The pandemic has been disastrous for millions of families across the United States. Roughly 8.5 million jobs have not returned since February 2020. Meanwhile, more than 564,000 people have died of the coronavirus, and 100,000 small businesses closed permanently in just the first three months of the crisis. The government has provided help, including through multiple relief packages that sent out three rounds of stimulus checks and extended unemployment benefits. But for many people it hasn’t been enough—or come quickly enough—to avoid eviction, put food on the table and cover a growing pile of monthly bills. Enter crowdfunding, which has taken off more than ever in the past year as a way to supplement income. Sites like GoFundMe, Kickstarter or even Facebook allow people and businesses to establish a cause—or set up a page laying out why they (or someone they are raising the money for) need money, and what the cash will go toward. After demand spiked last year, GoFundMe in October formalized a new category specifically for rent, food and bills. More than $100 million had been raised at that time year-to-date for basic living expenses in tens of thousands of campaigns during 2020—a 150 percent increase over 2019. But a year into the pandemic, some individual crowdfunding campaigns are reporting little success raising donations to cover basic expenses. As pandemic fatigue worsens, it’s getting hard to raise cash for basic expenses this way. Daryl Hatton, CEO and founder of FundRazr said when he browsed through the campaigns for basic expenses, most were getting little or no donations. “I saw a whole bunch of zeros,” he said. Crowdfunding still tends to work best when people have a compelling story to tell.

Older people are the one group egalitarians discriminate against (Quartz) Young people have always been critical of their elders. What’s noteworthy about the way millennials and Zoomers talk about Baby Boomers today isn’t their disdain but its particulars: They resent the older generation because they feel shortchanged, deprived of promising futures. Gen Z, for example, famously channeled their frustration with the generation they hold responsible for issues like climate change and wealth inequality into the simple, sarcastic meme “OK boomer.” Vaccines aside, these economic frustrations are grounded in reality. At the same time, younger people’s systemic objections to the distribution of wealth and power in the US can wind up curdling into ageism. A new paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, highlights the importance of guarding against this bias. Over 80% of Americans between the ages of 50 and 80 say they experience ageism in their everyday lives, according to a 2020 poll from the University of Michigan. “I think many people overlook ageism as a form of prejudice in American society,” says Ashley Martin, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, who co-authored the paper with Michael North, an assistant professor at New York University. “It is often overlooked as an “ism” altogether, not only being condoned but often even promoted.” The paper identifies a surprising link between ageism and egalitarianism. The more participants in the study supported the principle of equality for all, the more likely they were to be biased against older people.

[elichorph]

word hi ok here’s some info on annie ....  uhmMmgm.... ok

stats:

full name: annaleise grace suh nicknames: annie. call them anything else and you’ll get bit age: twenty one  birthday: october 27, 1999 chart: scorpio sun / gemini moon / taurus rising gender: demi girl pronouns: they / them & she / her sexuality: bisexual & biromantic  height: 5′9 tattoos: they shamelessly have like 7 of their own little doodles tattooed really small on their right bicep and one on their ankle too piercings: three earlobe piercings on each ear, double helix on their right ear, a nose stud

blackmail: 

as a famous artist, their art was spotted by a drug ring who launders money. they willingly sell their art through the ring as a means to transport both drugs and money, taking a cut of the cash and allowing the ring’s connections to boost their fame so they’ll stay quiet about it.

they did an excessive amount of philanthropy work in their second year at the university and posed it as charity work, but actually was doing mandated community service after being charged with theft

annie's family routinely and secretly took money from the kojima family to stay afloat and only stopped once they were caught. they were sued in civil court by the kojima's because of it and lost the case, leaving the suh family near penniless.

backstory:

this is a lot and i am sorry

tw: drugs

annie had a … pretty normal childhood. seriously like, it’s bland. nothing special so i’ll keep this brief. they were born in alabama and lived there for a single year before moving and was raised in a house in hartford, ct to two loving parents. although they weren’t incredibly well off, they always made sure there was a pack of ice cream sandwiches in the freezer and clearance rack flowers on the kitchen table. annie was posted up outside of the house with chalk drawing every little thing their mind could come up with every single day even though their parents desperately wished they were inside playing with the little doctor’s kit that they got them for their ninth birthday. but no ❤️annie was determined to be an artist despite their parent’s early pleads not to be. and annie’s never been one to take signals correctly in their life so their only child ass took this as a sign to start being edgy and self absorbed, focusing so much on themselves that they kind of shut their family out and wasn’t entirely aware of potentially sketchy things their parents did to keep money in the bank account. fr they just became like ... roommates and didn’t talk. the last time they spoke was when annie needed a lawyer last year. 

in high school, annie was a weird mix of tropes. they were the weird mysterious kid in the back of your english class who went on rants about how annoying romeo & juliet and romance are and the one who was president of clubs you’ve never even heard of and the underclassman who was friends with all the scary seniors (and later became the scary senior). in their junior year, they also conveniently went viral for a series of paintings they made in ap art class. it started locally and with being kinda famous on facebook to big gallery installations that had pieces which conveniently fit the aesthetics of mansions and big buyers. seriously, fame came fast for annie and by the end of their senior year they were well known enough to catch the eye of a drug ring who offered to bass boost it all for the small price of taking part in the sales of their art so the dealers can put a couple grams of cocaine in one of their lil pottery pieces and end up with way more money than they started with. 

yale thought annie’s fame and art and obscene amount of followers on instagram was kinda sexy so they were offered a full ride and gladly accepted and sells off all of their paintings and pottery pieces they make in class because why not ❤️ so here they are. with like a million followers on their art instagram and a big ego.

and annie’s a kleptomaniac, honestly. there’s no deep backstory as to why they decided to steal a pair of diamond earrings last year besides the fact that they wanted to. thankfully the judge let them off with community service, but you bet they spun that story to their advantage as soon as they could. if you saw annie posted up on their insta story picking up trash off of the highway with a big smile and “making time to clean up our highways!” across the bottom in pretty cursive, yes you did. 

personality: 

annie’s entire personality is one big paradox and then some.

they keep their life as a ✨famous person ✨ kind of bland so people won’t know a lot about them at the surface level unless they do some research. like they’ve got a main art instagram and stuff but then a personal one that you’ve gotta search for and also just ... doesn’t do interviews or anything like that. 

annie really loves people. like they crave small talk and holding the door open for people and smiling at people when they walk by them on campus. but on a deeper level, it’s a rarity that they’re good with others. seriously, they don’t know what the word communication means. if annie has a close friend or s.o. who things work perfectly well with and things are understood, that’s probably pure coincidence. they just kind of expect to understand people and have others understand them. things probably are fine to a certain point, like making small talk with whoever whenever, but i imagine it can only go so far lmao. like when you try to get close to annie, you’ll probably get sent a 400 word text message about needing space but then the next day they’re asking you to come over for four loko friday. mixed signal realness.

and even tho they love people and being surface level and nice and all, as seen in the tragic dropping of muse i, annie is volatile as hell! sometimes they’ll be mean just to entertain themselves bc they’re bored or they just get the urge or they feel like there’s a reason even if there’s not or something ... idk you never know with them. there are sure as hell days too when they just don’t even try to be nice to others either. annie’s got a temper and they go back and forth.

they lowkey crave strict control over their image but also love it when people think about them and give them attention. like ... yes they are having a breakdown daily about the blackmailer but they also deep down are like aw <3 

there’s part of them that wants cute romance ... the pottery scene in ghost ... painting their significant other ... all of that ... but they’ve got some deep rooted issues that make them think they don’t really need anyone. that maybe nobody will love them. even though they were the one that shut their parents out, their mind Loves to twist that situation to make it seem like they could’ve tried harder to get to know annie or support her or some shit bruh idk annie is so confusing.

ok but all the bad stuff aside .... if you actually like crack their code and get to know the real annie ..... they’re like kinda genuine and cool ig. they give really good advice and are extremely thoughtful and probably will make paintings inspired by you and maybe will gift you a handmade teapot and cook you your favorite dish if you talk about it once. annie is pretty funny too and they really have no fears because they are so self assured. they are SO shameless at times, even though it hurts them a lot more than it helps them. annie spends just about any free moment they get at the art studio. they’re always zooming with either dried clay all over their hands or paint on their jeans because they probably didn’t notice the time. really love memes like these ones. constantly wears big stompy boots. i really hope u get the picture i can’t write anymore

this is a tik tok that explains them well https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJufQVbP/

and here is their pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/mcvingparts/annie/

[mouthtrashworld]

HEAR ME OUT: PARIS HILTON INSPIRED ME TO GO TO ART SCHOOL

HEAR ME OUT: PARIS HILTON INSPIRED ME TO GO TO ART SCHOOL AND BECOME A FILMMAKER.

My sister and I played it cool until my parents dark purple grand caravan left the driveway. We knew we had to conceal our excitement of being home alone for a few hours in order to not seem suspicious. It was our chance to watch whatever trash was on television that day without the normal censorship our parents had set on us. My mother strived to win the gold medal for being a helicopter parent and my dad just agreed with whatever she said. Somehow we were always a step ahead of them. There was a vast lack of communication within my household which lead me to crave answers and sneak around to get them.

We really made a day of it. We pulled our big fluffy comforters off our beds and brought them to the couch, gathered every unhealthy snack from our cabinet (which was difficult as my mother kept a strict, low carb, low sodium, no sugar menu to chose from in our house) and hung heavy blankets over the windows to block out the glare on the 30 inch Panasonic VHS combo unit. My older sister, Cate, had control over the remote, she knew which channel number MTV played on and she memorized the Parental Control Password that was set on various channels that aired the exact rubbish it was to protect us from, but quickly became our favorite shows. At the time I didn’t even really know how Cate found out these shows existed. Our amount of media consumption was little to none. Living in a tiny town in Pennsylvania, attending private Christian school and hardly having a social life; our only connection to whats out there

would be the local blockbuster that my mother skirted us in and then quickly out of after renting wholesome family movies. I remember slipping away from my moms watch just long enough to find the “1 Night in Paris” sex tape DVD that was made in 2004 with Rick Salomon (who by the way has been married to Pamela Anderson TWICE!) and Paris Hilton as the star. A few years later, The Simple Life, featuring Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie became a huge success for Fox and was later taken over by E! network. The glimpse of the DVD cover was so scandalous I felt guilty just for looking at it. We were a few years late, really just catching the reruns of the show that E!, MTV or VH1 would play during the middle of the day, but we ate it up nonetheless.

The first episode I ever watched was on Season 5. The two girls become camp counselors and every week a different theme and set of campers come in to encounter their shenanigans. This episode was “Fat Camp” and the first order of business was for Paris and Nicole to give the campers enema’s before they start their week of dieting and exercise. It was absolutely ridiculous. I felt bad that these campers who fell victim to their bratty comments, yet my sister and I couldn’t take our eyes off it. Reality TV works in that way you know, where you feel bad, but not bad enough because its not your life.

Soon Cate and I started adding other reality shows to our pallet of rebellion. The Girls Next Door, a reality show about Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends living in the Playboy Mansion. Real World Cancun, AKA Jersey Shore before there was Jersey Shore. And of course The Hills where Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag live it up in Orange County, a place I

thought was made up until I visited there in 2014. But the Simple Life remained my favorite of them all. But Paris Hilton was my first glimpse of glamour, so she always remained my favorite. Granted, Kim Kardashian has seemed to surpass her on many levels after starting out as her intern. And sure maybe Paris is an heiress who will never run out of money or resources and people behind her, producing her, but Miss Hilton found a savvy way to brand herself right at the pinnicale of the internet and she still had to work for it. As a filmmaker I am hyper aware of the way we consume media, which is why I’ve taken such an interest to Paris and this manipulation she had turned into an art form.

Before we go on, in case you don’t know how Paris got famous, I’m here to give you a brief backstory. Paris Hilton, heiress to the Hilton Hotels empire, was actually raised a lot like me. Her parents were strict. She wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or have much of a social life. I believe her parents knew what kind of name she bared and the harsh reality that could come with it, so they kept her on a tight leash. Despite their efforts to keep her tame she slipped away, out into the world long enough to meet famous photographer David LaChapelle, who became enamored with Paris and her sister Nicky, and insisting he take their photo. She knew it was highly against her parents rules to engage in that kind of activity but she went for it. He designed an elaborate set and costumes for them and they went ahead naively thinking the photos would be just for them to admire in private but were later were published in a 2001 Vanity Fair issue, getting her in a whole lot of trouble. She later had to turn down and offer to do Playboy because her parents would disinherit her. By the time she was 18 her career as a model

and professional partier could really take off. Paris became absolutely obsessed with fame. She came up with a formulated routine on how to grab the paparazzi’s attention. She would find all the places photographers would be hanging out that day and go to every single location just to be seen and her plan really seemed to work. She was the bright and shining star of every tabloid in America. She describes in the documentary film, “American Meme” how desperate she was, spending hours searching for a place with someone, anyone to take her picture no matter what it took. Her paparazzi access seemed responsible for Paris to become a household name. — add on?

We have to remember that this time, 2007-2009, was a turning point, as smart phones and blackberries were now in almost every American’s pocket and we were craving the tea more than ever. Tabloids started working around the clock to deliver us the latest scoop at the now possible all hours of the day; i.e. the tragedies of Amy Whinehouse, LiLo and her drug escapades, Britney Spears and her hairless melt down, the list goes on. We asked for it, we got it and kept asking for more. After Paris sought out these outlets, the offers poured in. Her own show, movie roles, modeling for brand name designers, she became a DJ, became an author, a business woman, a fashion designer she owns hotels in Dubai and is currently carrying a hefty 10.5 million instagram follower count.

I know what you’re thinking, like okay so who cares about this rich “bimbo” (dubbed courtesy of a New York Post article circa 2007) but just hear me out. Most of us can relate to her story and if not, at least to some of her tactics. What I grew to realize after becoming social media obsessed (possibly because I was deprived as a child) is that

no matter how information changes or what new technology comes to pass it along to us, we will always be doing it in the same way. I watched Myspace come and pass, seeing thousands of singers, bands and actresses get discovered through that site, even some playmates in Playboy magazine. I saw Facebook allow us to put every single thing about our lives on blast at any minute of the day. Twitter allows us to barf our thoughts up in once 180, now 280 characters, Vine stars made 6 seconds videos and now make 6 figures from their fame and last but not least Instagram, and trust me when I say I cringe having to say this, “influencers” sell to us with every photo or video they post. Whether that be a lifestyle, a product or just themselves as a person. A vast majority of us have to admit that we are drinking the juice. We ourselves are partaking in marketing our “best life” being lived via Instagram. So ask yourself, what is the difference between what we are doing on the Gram versus what Paris was doing in 2006, showcasing her persona to the media in the only way it was accessible at the time? Why not manipulate it the same way it manipulates us? Find out where the quote on quote Paparazzi are and market yourself the same way reality stars did.

Not that I have the intention to come up in the same way some of these heiresses who’s names are already famous or these vine stars or twitter comedians did but I have the power to show a portion of the world who I am and what I can do to earn my career as a filmmaker and communicator via social media.

I realized that what I was doing as a little kid, waiting for my parents to leave to seek a world outside my own is exactly what Paris did. She took the risk and got the answers.

Her obsession with fame coincided with my obsession with social media, to communicate and or get my work out there. I’m just trying to work system to brand myself. My research shows that the reality show we down load from an app store and place in our pockets has led me to some big wins. Upon getting hired for shoots or my work recognized in some way, I see there is a formula to the entire thing. When to post, how to post, who to follow, etc. I have no producers behind me to curate my Instagram, I have no connection to someone with a big name. All I have is myself to show for what I can do and if I keep going back to the place with the most access to the loudest voices , like Paris did I may have a shot at getting my own voice out there and I will say more important things than “thats hot” I promise you.

In the end I think that the reason I clung to Paris and her story so deeply was because it was virtually first and foremost example I had and to as impressionable young woman, that kind of thing sticks. The definition of success and how to obtain it was taught to me was by sneaking her show on a Saturday afternoon while my parents when to Shop Rite without me. I’ve just stayed observing all the ways fame has developed via internet and can lead to success. But the beauty of the defying gravity factor is that this blond “bimbo” and many other “bimbos” like her have done the same thing, most without the Hilton name. All I did was think twice before I believed that reality television was just a trashy phase. Instead I realized that I, like many others, am still consuming similar content in 2009 now in 2019, the difference is its in the palm of my hand and I’m deciding to take advantage of it.

[jewish-privilege]

The deadliest attack on Jews in American history appears to have triggered a spike in anti-Semitic searches on Google, exclusive research by CNN shows.

In the hours and days after 11 people were slaughtered inside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last October, so many people typed hateful language into Google that it produced the most anti-Semitic searches seen in the last 12 months.

Our analysis did not include benign searches for information about the news but users seeking material for "Jews must die," "kill Jews," and "I hate Jews," among others, all of which were searched at alarmingly higher rates than normal.

An increase in anti-Semitic Google searches was also found after the Passover shooting in Poway, California in April.

And as might be expected, postings on sites like 4chan and 8chan that have largely been co-opted by those with far-right views, also saw plenty of discussion about the attacks, though the content was more surprising as well as disturbing.

CNN commissioned the analysis from advocacy group HOPE Not Hate. They researched a sample of mainstream and fringe responses online for a year from May 2018 to last week to better understand how anti-Semitic views are shared and spread online, especially in the wake of the two synagogue attacks that struck fear into the hearts of American Jews. The findings come days after the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said anti-Semitic incidents in America rose for the third year in a row, hitting near-historic highs. There were 1,879 documented attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions across the country in 2018.

Searching for "kill Jews" on Google yields stories about the Holocaust, but also specifics on how Nazis killed the Jews, and a plethora of stories of people who have made threats against Jews.

A search for the term "Jews must die" brings up stories about the Pittsburgh shooter, who allegedly shouted that before the shooting. But Googling "I hate Jews" takes you to a variety of pages ranging from a Wikipedia entry about self-hating Jews to an article about a Vice co-founder, who left the company more than a decade ago, launching into a rant about Jews in a post titled "10 things I Hate About Jews." Among the articles also are comments from President Donald Trump telling Republican donors that Democrats "hate Jewish people."

As you dive deeper into the search results of Google, the articles become less mainstream and more offensive. More rants and anti-Semitic vitriol from white supremacist sites come up.

Google searches for "kill Jews" were also atypically high, reaching levels not seen since the Pittsburgh aftermath, in the wake of the Passover shooting that killed one woman and injured the rabbi and others, our research shows.

The massive interest in anti-Semitism after so many Jews were killed in cold blood terrifies Carly Pildis in every fiber of her being.

As a Jewish woman living in Washington, DC, who takes her two-year-old daughter to synagogue and writes for the Jewish news and culture Tablet magazine, the increasing violence is alarming and is impacting real life.

"It is a serious life or death threat for American Jews," Pildis says. "I feel a sense of loss, for what it used to be like for Jews here."

The loss turns to outright fury, when she learns more about the searches after the twin attacks on her community."It makes my blood run cold," she says. "It is literally chilling me to the core."

These searches feel like attacks too. That people are openly hunting online for ways to hurt the Jewish community after they have suffered devastating losses.

It is personal, for her, like other Jews who feel under threat. She says each assault on a Jew or vandalism of property with a swastika impacts her. And the massacres, well, they feel like a death in the family.

On the day of the attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue, she laid sick in bed. Then she got a call from a friend apologizing profusely. She didn't know what they were sorry for. Turn on the TV now, she was told. When she did, she saw the deadliest attack on American Jews unfolding. It was the moment she had feared most since watching Neo-Nazis march on the streets of Charlottesville in 2017 chanting "Jews will not replace us!"

Seeing someone try to wipe out Jews in a synagogue gutted her.

Pildis sat on the bathroom floor, writing opinion pieces about what it all meant, trying to come to grips with it."I don't think I slept for days. It was heartbreaking. It was terrifying. It was soul crushing," she explains.

While Pildis grieved the loss of Jewish lives in her home, in the darker, though freely available, corners of the internet, people celebrated.

On sites like 4chan and 8chan, levels of extreme and violent anti-Semitism are often found daily. But that amount of hatred soared even higher, with spikes in the number of anti-Jewish posts on 8chan's /pol/ board observed directly following the Tree of Life attack, our research found.

Many posts lamented "how few" Jews were killed in both Pittsburgh and Poway, reducing human lives to a "score."...

A commenter on 8chan however called the Poway shooter a "f*****g underachiever."

"Can you imagine your son throwing his whole life away for a high score of 1? It's just embarrassing," a post read.

There was also a large amount of general white supremacist posts, such as "KILL THEM ALL."

But most common was a declaration by many posters that it was actually Jewish people who carried out the attacks on other Jews to gain support in society and provide cover for other alleged nefarious activity. It mimics a long, false, conspiratorial theory repeated among anti-Semites, including those who falsely claim the Holocaust specifically was faked.

The concern among experts studying radicalization is how many people can begin by searching anti-Semitic phrases on a mainstream site like Google but end up being drawn into places like 4chan and 8chan and other forums where white supremacists lurk, spewing hate.

And once you engage, hatred seems to grow...

But the impact of the forums and hate sites remains clear. On 8chan, a poster believed to be [the Poway shooter] called alleged Pittsburgh shooter...a direct inspiration. [The Poway shooter] is thought to have made frequent anti-Semitic comments alongside xenophobic content on Gab, another home to far-right extremists.

Joanna Mendelson, a senior researcher for the ADL's Center on Extremism, calls 4chan and 8chan the "lion's den of hate." "White supremacists are weaponizing hate," Mendelson, says. "They are using the internet to broadcast their message to global audiences. They are arming legions of trolls to push their message out across the internet, to the darkest corners and even mainstream platforms," she says.

...Others who have been radicalized online have said they find that within one to three months their views have changed completely and they have fallen prey to the brainwashing. They simply don't believe they've been taken advantage of at the time. That the repeated use of memes, which are meant to act as jokes but sow seeds of hate, is working, those who have escaped the cycle of hate tell CNN.

And the fear is that, if more people may become consumed by hate on 4chan or 8chan, some may take their hate from the forums to the streets.

...Even the seasoned hate-speech researchers commissioned by CNN were shocked at the depravity they found after the two synagogue attacks.

"I say we go all in and start the war, I am ready" one poster writes.

"Hitler did nothing wrong. Soon the entire world will hate the Jews," writes another.

...Another post specifically begins to write the names of the murderers in a numbered list ending with an ellipsis, signifying the desire for more to come.

He or she suggests more attacks until everyday Americans "will accept mosque and synagogue killings as a normal thing."

...Social media giants like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are being forced to reckon with the power their platforms have in both size and how they amplify hate speech while working to balance free speech.

But more fringe sites, where little if any moderation occurs, seem to present an even larger danger.

And more troubling, perhaps, is the lack of suggestion of what to do about it from the intelligence and law enforcement community.

In a House hearing last week on domestic terrorism, top law enforcement officials couldn't provide an answer as to how to handle websites like 8chan and what legislation could do. CNN has sought comment in the past but their largely unmoderated and unmanaged platforms make it difficult.

That hate spreads online, at the rates CNN found, is unfathomable to Jews like Pildis. She fears the attacks are only beginning, and more will come.

"It makes me unbearably sad, so sad I can barely breathe, to see this rise of hate, extremism and violence," she says. "But they will never take away my hope or my pride in being a Jew - and an American."

Pildis wants those spreading hate to know there is a path out, but if they choose to continue to spew hate against Jews or attack them, the community will never cower.

"Whatever void you are hoping to fill will not be filled with the barrel of a gun," Pildis says. "The Jewish people have survived over 5,000 years of oppression and violence. Our very existence is an act of resistance. We aren't going anywhere."

[especdreamy]

Love Like You 2019

I got into SU fairly late into the game, I was staying at home for a few days because I was sick or something and the first season was on Netflix back then.

I binged it, and REALLY wanted to watch more, I sorta knew what had happened since one of my friends shared lots of memes on Facebook as the show ran. My first watch of SU was composed of watching an array from the YouTube videos I was able to find (I was grounded without pc or phone too...only had the Smart TV) I watched episodes which were divided in parts, mirrored, had a frame; some were English dub, some had spanish subs, others with portuguese sub — I also watched episodes in BOTH Spanish-language dubs. It was a messy watch, it was disordered, confusing. I missed some episodes because the titles weren't accurate. But the show was so good, so charming. And in 3 days I managed to watch up to Lars' Head.

It was November 2017, we didn't know when we were going to get new episodes. My interest fell down as my irl friend told me the show had been on hiatus for around 9 months. I sorta forgot about the show, just doodling on paper the characters but never following closely news about it. I had bad online experiences before which made me scared of joining the fandom.

Then, in May 2018, a classmate asked if I had seen the new episodes. New episodes? We got new episodes? I watched them asap and I have been in an hyperfixation ever since.

The show was beautiful, the characters inspiring, the story full of fantasy, love, acceptance and peace.

Obviously, I decided to take the risk, I wanted to be able to talk with more people who loved this show as much as me — I first got into Amino, but its rules were confusing and sometimes seemed way too restrictive when it was about being off-topic.

I started checking out Tumblr, posts around my favorite ship that was Lapidot, checking some accounts, just the regular before actually joining the website. I want to have a base and know a bit about other people before starting to talk to them on the internet, just so it's easier to befriend them and feel more included.

This show...is important for me, not only because of the media itself; but joining this community has helped me SO MUCH with my personal growth, my confidence, the way I act and feel. I learned about myself and about others.

Seeing that Peridot putting Lapis' feeling OVER her own made me notice what was that damaged me in past instances, I also finally saw a character to which I personally felt related to. I learned how to express myself and about the many mediums to do so.

This show is fantastic, it still is — it has made me scream, it has made me (almost) cry. I let my brain go wild with scenarios and characters and so many things for the first time in a long time. And I have never felt this happy before.

Listening to songs that cause me joy, thinking about quotes or scenes that inspire me. The growth of the characters that made me realize my own. I want to thank this show for so many things. I feel sad that I joined so late to the ride, but I was still able to enjoy it as much as I could with any other show. I'm excited to see what comes next, how our favorite characters will go, what the next arguments, apologies and resolutions will be.

Because the most amazing thing of this show is how you can grow with it and it feels so natural.

I'm glad of believing in Steven, and I'm thankful of seeing how far we've all come.

[heliosphoenix]

The sky calls to us

There’s a reason I keep a separate blog where I choose to chime in on some political happening or other. It’s something I take great care in doing. It’s easy to get it wrong (and in my younger days, I often did get it wrong), so I have to make an effort to get my ducks in a row. Even so, it’s nominally something I try to avoid whenever possible, which is why in my srs business blog’s early days, I was focused more on fandom drama.

The problem though is that now it’s become impossible to avoid. I know there are those of you out there who resent the incursion of real world events onto your tumblr feed, or the Twitter’s or Facebook’s of your favorite celebs. I do as well. I personally would rather talk about anything else and I’m willing to bet they would love to do the same. 

But the world has become so volatile now that it can no longer be avoided. And despite the fact that I had literally gone two months without touching this site, even I couldn’t stand idly by while all of us, every lover of freedom wherever it may exist in the world, were being set up the bomb. 

To say the last 48 hours have been surreal is an understatement. But not entirely surprising.

We resent the incursion of these events onto our feeds because we want the internet to be our shelter from it all. I’m here to tell you that it was irrational to think the internet would be immune.

When the world has decided that compromise is for losers and the only thing that matters is to win at any cost, then it stands to reason that the internet will follow along.

Unless it’s leading the way. And in many respects, it’s leading the way.

So where do we go from here? When I say I haven’t touched this site in some time, it’s not exactly a statement of pride. I won’t lie to you all when I say it’s been hard for me to work up the effort to browse the internet these days. If you went back 15 years or so and told my adolescent self, the 7th grade kid who knew what memes were a full 5-6 years before his classmates did, that there’d come a point in time where he’d want to hide from the internet? He’d call you insane.

Part of the reason I’ve avoided this site is because of the self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head that resulted in the censoring of many blogs I followed (as well as one I ran). But the other part is that I find I no longer have the energy to engage in the sort of thing that passes for “discourse” here like I did in the past. While it is still my desire, if not my duty, to talk with you all with some candor about what is happening in the world today, I’m rather disenchanted by the prospect of posting an article that gives an update on Brexit proceedings or the state of the Russia investigation and coming back to find sizzling hot takes in my notes that make me want to pay a visit to Comrade Smirnoff. 

And I’ll be honest. The prospect of staring down a smug faced Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as they win re-election and continue to be worshiped by the assholes of the world isn’t exactly appealing to me either. 

Any potential benefits of going back to discussing fandom drama don’t really seem that attractive either. My years in furrydom sapped my capacity for fandom politics long ago. I spoke out in favor of bronies because I could see through the lies and manipulations and it got to a point where I said all that a person could reasonably say on the matter. Considering the success of the show and that the public image of the fandom has improved, I’d like to think my efforts were a success. 

I don’t know enough about the other fandoms making waves right now to offer an opinion, and frankly I’m not inclined to engage. I saw the remastered Star Wars trilogy when I was 7 years old. I went to midnight showings for every movie that’s come out since (even the prequels). I would much prefer to discuss the merits of the new movies with my local group of friends instead of coming on here and writing a 1,000 word dissertation on The Last Jedi that would ultimately end up with me getting dragged into an ad-hominem laden argument with 3 other users.

I see some of my esteemed comrades still have the energy for that. Alas, I am no longer that strength which in old days moved heaven and Earth.

Speaking of which: Elite Dangerous.

Elite Dangerous is, as I describe it, a Space MMO. Set in a 1:1 scale recreation of the Milky Way galaxy that is based on actual astronomical data and scientific principles. 

It’s the closest I’ve ever truly gotten, and may ever truly get, to being the captain of a Spaceship. 

A trip out to the Robin’s Egg nebula envelopes you in a sea of gas, tinted blue by the light of a Blue White Supergiant just passing into adolescence. The nebula is home to a sea of young Red Dwarfs, small rocky bodies, ringed planets who’s metal surface is more of a sea of lava, and even a small Black Hole.

But it’s not just a recreational trip, you’re here at the behest of a scientist who’s willing to pay you a lot of credits to fly out to this stellar nursery. Once complete, you head back to your Space Station in Geosync orbit around Earth. A station named after Abraham Lincoln, as one does when naming starports. You drop your passengers off, get your next assignment, and you’re off to another star system 20 light years away.

The internet is able to get away with a lot, namely because underneath all the memes and controversy and drama are a bunch of people (mainly millennials) who occasionally make some money when their video of them yelling about a bad movie or winning victory royale hits a certain number of views on YouTube. It gets away with a lot because fandoms are real, living, vibrant communities that you can feel whenever you go to a convention or post in the appropriate tags.

In Elite Dangerous, you go into the game not expecting much. And you’re frequently rewarded by visiting strange new worlds that you never thought could’ve existed.

There’s a group of trolls in the game, they seek to cause as much mayhem and chaos as possible because they’re upset that the vibe of Elite Dangerous is not what they want it to be. It’s not the bitterly nostalgic vibe of Valve games, or the hyper competitive alpha vibe of Overwatch or Call of Duty. It’s certainly not the paranoid warmongering vibe of EvE online.

Elite Dangerous is a bunch of people exploring the galaxy.

And, I dunno, I feel that as a culture, a society, a civilization, and a species, maybe we could eventually work our way up to that. 

Maybe not.

There’s a system in Elite known simply as “The View.” 1400 light years away from Earth, it contains a ringed planet orbiting around a Blue-White star younger than the ones in Robin’s Egg. If you set down near the pole of this planet, you get a great view of the rings, as well as a Pulsar and, if you’re lucky, two Black Holes.

 When you venture out further, you see many wondrous sights.

A planet covered in water with massive ice sheets at the poles in an almost comical inversion of the future predicted by those fighting climate change.

Binary stars close enough that trying to shoot the gap nearly burns your spaceship to a crisp.

Worlds with magnificent ring systems that put Saturn’s to shame.

Pulsars with massive jets that swirl and twist like cosmic tornadoes.

And those are just the procedurally generated bodies. Stars and planets and others placed where they are because computer models based on hard science said they should be there.

Still plenty of room for real life celestial bodies. Like VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest stars in the galaxy.

Or Jupiter and the Galilean moons.

Or the Black Hole V404 Cygni.

The experience of Elite Dangerous is truly otherworldly, the kind of thing that ingrains itself in your mind and will not leave. The game is unnervingly beautiful not just because of its technical prowess, but because of what it can inspire.

Right now, this is just a video game, but there’s still the chance that there’s beauty in this galaxy that is not only unseen but completely unthinkable. Without Elite, it would be literally unimaginable. 

It’s this inspiration that pushes me forward, that drives me in my attempt to help enlighten those around me, even if at times it feels the struggle will soon be lost. 

This could be our future, but the only way to get there is together.

Somewhere out there in a sea of 400 Billion stars is a world just like this one. 

We owe it to ourselves to give our descendants a chance to visit. Just in case it turns out to be Equestria. 

[mallorytaylorblog]

Be grateful - it’s not personal.

I want to offer you this post as a reminder. Some of you will already know, and to those who don’t I hope this gives you something important to consider.

I went on my daily walk today, and I often find a lot of inspiration whilst on my walk, and I thought about a situation that happened at work the other day. My assistant store manager and I work together 2 out of 7 days a week in a retail store and we usually will take a minute or two to regale each other with stories of the rude customers we encounter in the week just passed. Sometimes it’s nice to vent to someone who understands. Well, on Friday she told me of a customer who, after she had greeted her hello, retorted, “No need to talk to me today, I’m just browsing”. She implied there was a bit of attitude from the woman. “Great, this is the kind of day I can expect,” my ASM thought. I called her at about 1pm before I got to work that day and as she put me on hold I overheard her saying to another customer at the counter that she was the first kind person she had encountered all day! Oh boy. No doubt she’d have some stories to tell.

I can empathise because during my retail career I’ve met many people like the woman with the attitude; people that can just be flat out rude. Because of this and the conversations my ASM and I have been having about those people, I’ve more recently I’ve been working really hard on letting go of the impact these customers have on me and venting and gossiping less. As I listened to my ASM tell me about this customer I thought to myself how grateful I would have been in that moment had that have been me receiving the attitude.

If I’m honest I was in a great mood when she told me this story and I know had I been less than relaxed and received a customer like that first thing in the morning I probably wouldn’t have been feeling so grateful in the moment. I probably would have indulged and bitched a little about her too - a habit I’m picking myself up on more and more. And heaven knows I have absolutely engaged in bitter and petty responses to customers like that woman so many times before. But knowing how shitty those people have made me feel and knowing how much I didn’t want them to affect me any longer I undertook the task of realising that shit like that simply isn't personal.

I have cried over how mean customers have been to me before. I have laughed in customer’s faces over how incredulous I thought their attitudes toward me, a complete stranger, were. I have come home and told my partner passionately and resentfully how slighted I felt by that ‘rude bitch who ignored me then had the nerve to ask for help today’. And all the times I bitched about people who I perceived to have ‘slighted me’ left me feeling no better than I did in the moment I was slighted - I didn’t feel lighter, I didn’t feel happier or less stressed, and at the very least I had spread some of that contempt and negativity to another person. Not the best feeling, realising that.

As I listened to my ASM tell me the story of that rude customer, I explained to her why I would have been grateful had it been me. I told her, “that woman saved you from spending energy trying to greet her and make her feel welcome, energy that she didn’t want or appreciate, that you could spend on another person who would be more welcoming of it. She practiced crystal clear communication with you, allowing you to put your energy towards another task that needs to be done or towards helping someone who actually needs it. I’d be thankful for her giving me the opportunity to save my breath and get back to doing something I’m more interested in”. Sure the tone in which she spoke to my 2IC may not have been the most pleasant, but that lady could have been having an absolute shocker of a morning and didn’t have the energy or patience to be emotionally performative for the sake of a sales assistant she likely wouldn’t have even thought about at the end of her day. And my 2IC could have saved her energy getting upset over something that didn’t even really concern her and got on with doing the job she loves, unaffected by a stranger.

I appreciate that some days people just get to you more than others, and we don’t always show up to the world as our best selves. We as retail and hospitality staff are also emotionally performative to a degree every day we’re at work. We have to be nice, welcoming and placating, doing our best to bend over backwards for people we don’t know. And it can be exhaustive especially when we’re not in the best mindset - I saw a meme not long ago in which the author wrote about using all her allocated niceness at work then running out before she got home. I’ve felt that before. But I believe that “allocated niceness” is a limit we set upon ourselves that can easily be relieved by a practice of gratitude.

Finding reasons to be grateful for the people we perceive to have slighted us relieves us from the burden of resentment.

Practicing non-judgement goes hand in hand with this sentiment. When we judge people who slight us as being rude, an asshole, ignorant, childish, etc. we limit ourselves from seeing them as people who have their own worlds and bubbles they’re wrapped up in, just like we are wrapped up in our own. When we go shopping we don’t swan about the grocery aisles thinking about how our every action is personally directed at all the people around us, do we? No we don’t. So why is it when we feel slighted by a stranger we think it’s so personal? It’s not. At least rarely ever. When I feel utter disbelief that a person could be so rude bubble to the surface I’ve had to remind myself over and over again that hurt people, hurt people. People are dealing with things every day we may never know about. Strangers deserve even more our love and kindness, not our judgement. And we can choose our emotional response when we don’t get their best self.

Gratitude is a powerful practice and finding reasons to be thankful for those who have slighted us keep us from damaging ourselves with the weight of feelings like contempt, resentment, anger and even jealousy. Use the glass of water analogy - holding onto a full glass of water in an outstretched hand is fine in the short term, but the longer you hold it the heavier it becomes; the more tired and shaky your arm muscles become. Eventually it will feel like a 1 tonne weight, but if you put the glass down - if you let go of the feelings of contempt - you’re free of the burden. No one is forcing you to hold it. It only hurts you.

Try putting the glass down next time you find yourself getting angry that someone wasn’t nice to you. Let go of the judgement, offer them some kindness instead, and find ways to be grateful for the messages or feelings they’ve evoked in you. It takes practice and a lot of awareness to call it out in the moment, but you’ll be much happier if you can nail it more often than not.

Instagram Facebook

[hollohat]

why am I on Tumblr at 12:49 AM?

It’s an odd moment to be logging back into Tumblr. I’ve been gone for months - so long, in fact, that I had to have a magic link emailed to me after I realized I’ve forgotten my password. It seems the trend right now is to jump ship, and I understand why. This has never been a platform to proudly advertise to friends and family - part of what draw me to it, a place insulated from my uncontrollable life - but the lengthy series of unfortunate decisions being made by its ownership, culminating on the recent crackdown on adult content, as they put it, seems like an ever-mounting stack of proverbial straw. I freely admit that my presence here, typing into the quiet midnight void, comes after the latest of several rounds of looking for a less problematic Tumblr alternative.

The search has been unsuccessful, yet again. Why? Well, part of it is nostalgia. I made my first account here, now lost to post-middle school growing pains, in 2012. Tumblr taught me the language of social justice, and it gave me a sense of community - of overly committed fans, of students clinging to the overexposed glow of positivity, of other language learners trying to suck the marrow of a foreign history and culture from the internet. It was kind of a waste of time, but kind of a lifeline too, sometimes.

I was on Facebook back then, too, and Youtube, but neither of those let me express myself in the risk-free, low effort way Tumblr did. By judiciously reblogging the original content made by others, I could participate in conversations and build a self-image without really leaving my habitual role of forum-stalker. Because my blog was dissociated from my real identity - or at least seemed to be; I have no doubt a determined seeker with a few scraps of personal information could find it in a matter of hours - I was free to post as I pleased, away from the imagined eyes of friends and family. 

And the content I was reposting was compelling. Instagram and Facebook, with their old-people memes and shiny photographs bored me. They still do, for the most part. Interesting Youtube videos were hard to find and slow to download over my rural-dirt-road internet connection. But Tumblr was overflowing with a variety of things I wanted to see. There were beautiful, imaginative illustrations of my favorite books, and equally imaginative, if often vitriolic, arguments thereabout. There were insightful analyses of the news, and news, too, that I never saw on the front pages of the outlets I was starting to follow. There were the voices of minorities I didn’t have the chance to meet in real life. There were extensive, carefully researched compendia of study tips and recources. There inspirational stories of success, and inspirational stories of failure. There were beautiful photographs and touching poems I would never find in a literature class. 

Tumblr has a language. It’s hard to encapsulate in words. The odd capitalization and the newly coined slang I’ve seen analyzed by an excited linguist is part of it. It’s there in a more abstract way too, in the content posted and shared here, and in the communities. I can’t think of anywhere else to find the masterposts of advice and free books and free films, the doting treatment of obscure fictional characters, the tight-knit communities of gardeners and students and witches and many more I don’t know about. This isn’t an attempt to romanticise Tumblr or wipe away its many profound problems. It is often toxic and extremist, and the pornbots and admin aren’t helping. But I felt like writing tonight, and this is where I came, because in a sense, I feel at home here. Because I need a place for self-expression, and the words flow here as they don’t anywhere else. 

Tumblr seems right now to be on its way down, but I can’t help hoping, however foolishly, that it will make an unlooked for recovery, that it will grow to be a better platform for a healthier community, or that I will find everything I want from it in some fresh, as-yet-unknown platform. Until then, the search goes on, and here I am, a ridiculous newcomer to a sinking ship. 

Hi, Tumblr. I’ve missed you. 

[deyasworld]

Mind if I suggest one? I joined in 2012, but I saw posts and memes of that era.

Pre-HomestuckSuperWhoLock Era:

The best selling feature Tumblr had to offer was its anonymity. Twitter had celebrities, Facebook had the people you knew from school, you had to pay $1.75 to get the Instagram app, but Tumblr was a real free estate. Your mom wasn’t here, your employers didn’t use it, Celebrities hadn’t claimed their URLs yet. This all meant:

Tumblr was relatively a Marginalized Group Safe Space. The LGBT+ community and the Feminists were the most notorious groups to occupy the space. With features such as Audio Posting, Video Posting, Mass Picture Posting, GIFs, Custom HTML hosting, a Tagging System, Reblogging, AND Anonymity, this site had everything Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and YouTube could and couldn’t offer! It was Perfect to make Social Justice blogs, and as a casual user, you could vague about the sexist classmate that won’t shut up without repercussions. Speaking of marginalized groups making home on Tumblr:

Signal Boosting and Donation Culture started as a way to support these communities. As lots of youth began making home on Tumblr, a lot of people that came out of abusive households started to post about their situations. There would be lots of posts with suicidal undertones and posts of people worried about the inactivity of their friend. With the discovery of PayPal’s easy banking options, people started donating to their friends in need, so helping a friend was as easy as clicking a link and filling a from. I remember that back in 2012, you could pay $1-$7 to boost or pin a post to the dashboard to promote it. Commission Culture was also part of this, because it was more effective to sell art than ask for donations, so they started making art blogs, and it was the reason why reblogs were so important. This last culture might have been one of the keys that gave birth to the super boom of Tumblr fandom culture.

Tumblr had its own culture memes. With the freedom of format and safety of judgement from people you know in real life, you could make the wittiest and stupidest posts. Lots of Tumblr Posts began being screenshot and posted on CheezBurger and other meme archives. The refreshing sass of Tumblr posts was due to the new freedom of the user base, because your traditional Rage Comics and Inspirational Memes would be very White, Male, and CisHet, and gave a strong feeling of gatekeeping where the simplicity of these new memes just could not flourish.

It was also perfect for Porn Archives. Porn blogs used to be run by actual people. Porn was never my thing, but when I’d run into a porn blog, I remember it was somewhat tasteful. Of course there were a lot of Gay Porn Blogs that posted gifs and videos, and a lot of casual NSFW text posts and roleplaying. I remember seeing a 4chan rant about how mad they were because Tumblr stopped supporting .TIFF files, which was the quality they used to post their porn, but that wasn’t until Third Age Tumblr. Speaking of 4Chan:

It will sound weird and I don’t like how this will sound, but Tumblr had a sustainable population of CisHet men, mostly using it for memes and/or porn archiving. The Social Justice vibe of the site hadn’t completely affected them yet, but we used to have some decent CisHet men ( think of the Men of Tumblr Post ). There was also a known population ( that unfortunately prevailed ) of men that felt offended by the Feminist and Gay posts, so you’d start to see Egalitarians, Men’s Rights Activists, and the ones that call you a Femi-Nazi, trying to make a space for themselves in the site, usually pouring in from 4Chan to send death threats. Any way, these guys evolved to become Incels and Neo-Nazis. The decent men started disappearing one by one because they’d get sick of the drama, but sometimes it would be because a feminist post offended them. Yes, of course, Tumblr still has its share of obnoxious CisHet Women, but we’ll talk about them soon.

The origins of Tumblr’s infamous Fandom Culture might or might have not been a product of DeviantArt Immigration. I was a DA user before I joined Tumblr, and I joined because I noticed a lot of my friends got into a mysterious piece of media called Homestuck, and I wanted to understand it ( never joined the fandom tho ). What made Tumblr different from DeviantArt was that it wasn’t art centric, so the art elitism wasn’t as obvious here as it was there. Tumblr Artists still had more followers and their casual posts had more attention, but a non-artist could surpass them if they had better jokes or headcanons. I believe that by having a bunch of teenagers trying to crack jokes for notes, the ambience became more obnoxious. Since there was no algorithm and there was no way to filter posts by type in the tags, Fanart that was posted closer to when the media dropped got better chances at becoming viral than well produced fanart. This is also why a poorly made crack Fanart has more chances at being reblogged than a serious piece that took you 3 days to finish. Even though Tumblr’s tag system was a mess to find quality posts, Google’s algorithm took notice of the carefully tagged and archived posts, and Tumblr-posted fanart and memes started to appear in Google searches. If my assumptions are correct, people joined DeviantArt because the art kept popping on Google searches, so that made Tumblr its competitor. Also Tumblr could post 10 gifs in a row, which became an essential thing in shitposting and fangirling. Now speaking of DeviantArt and annoying CisHet Women......

This will sound bad, and I can’t think of a better way to say this, but Tumblr is responsible for the sophistication of the.... (forgive me for the word) “Fujoshi”. Tumblr was a social media with a notorious LGBT+ community, with Gay content by Gay people for Gay people, but with Tumblr becoming an extremely promising Fandom space, so came in the Yaoi Shippers. Sophisticated how? Well, let’s say that when an LGBT+ person makes Gay content, they do it in a respectful light, reflecting themselves and their desires, but when a Straight Woman does “Gay” content, it’s often objectifying, sexualizing, and misunderstanding of the Gay experience, so while a Gay person enjoys Slash content in a normal way, these girls consume it like it is a dirty fetish of theirs. They were also known for being very transphobic and misogynistic. There was a time where all sorts of terrible ships that included incest and pedophilia had become normalized under the idea that “normal couples are vanilla”. The first callouts were made to correct this behavior, because the goal was to make these girls understand that what they were doing was disrespectful to Gay men and women, when they insisted they were being Allies to the LGBT+ community. A lot of them understood and grew out of it, some came out as Transgender or Gay, while others kept insisting on behaving like that and shrug off the pleas of the community by saying that Tumblr is full of “Drama” and that it’s user base gets “Easily Offended”. I wonder.... if these became TERFs in the long run....

And of course there were the Hipster fashion bloggers that liked that Tumblr was low key and “different”.

SuperWhoLock and Homestuck were the culmination of these cultures, and I often think that you can blame DashCon on them. I don’t know how things were in 2007-2011, but this is what I experienced and I hope it resonates with you guys.

Dividing up eras of tumblr

It just occurred to me that I kind of arbitrarily started referring to “first age” “second age” and “third age” tumblr one day because I realized during a discord conversation that it really can be divided up very effectively between a couple major events that changed the fabric of the site’s culture almost overnight, but nobody but me ever refers to them that way, so by way of explanation:

First Age: everything before Dashcon. Art communities were still largely thriving on the internet and social media still mostly existed out from under corporate monopolies, and people were just wildly guessing about how to use it. We were in the last hurrah of the internet wild west and lolcats were still a thing. Tumblr was just a fun and quirky place, we were blissfully writing unironic posts about tumblr university and fandom vs hipster and the “I like your shoelaces” thing, Hank Green wrote a goddamn song about tumblr, we were all like Adam and Eve dwelling in Eden unaware of their sin. Potterheads grab your wands.

Second Age: post-Dashcon, but pre-Purge. We have all eaten the fruit of knowledge and there is no going back. There are no more secret code or tumblr university posts because everyone knows firsthand how badly that would go. Fandom culture is forever changed. We are now aware that we live in a hellish cringetopia but have absolutely no plans to leave, because by now a combination of monopolies and a sneaky rise in purity culture has the internet by the throat (but not in a kinky way, that would scare off advertisers) so there aren’t a lot of better options, and at least our relatives can’t find us here. A lot of artists now have their primary presence on tumblr. The lax policies regarding nsfw and controversial content mean it’s a good space for queer creators and sex workers despite the many shortcomings we’re now aware of. The porn bot plague really kicks into full gear to the point that every time our follower counts go up we’re ready with the block/spam button like the uncles from Secondhand Lions picking off traveling salesmen. The drama starts to get really fucking weird, with classics such as the human pet guy and the bone-stealing witch.

Third Age: post-Purge. After changing corporate hands a few times, the drive to make the internet safe for our Good Christian Advertisers and hypothetical children has finally reached us, and brings with it TERFs, purity culture, and the Porn Ban, which was allegedly a solution to the porn bots except that it clearly wasn’t at all. The large community of sex workers and artists that was keeping tumblr afloat as anything resembling a viable social media site have made a mass exodus and a lot of the rest of the userbase followed them, mostly to twitter or a few doomed attempts at tumblr copycats. Tumblr is now a mad max clown car full of people too stubborn to pack up and leave for a functional website. It’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland whose only remaining merit is that even without the ability to post porn we’ve managed to make ourselves such a complete anathema to advertisers that we’re mostly just left alone. We’re all just tired. Some people still run art blogs but nobody outside of tumblr ever sees them.  Literally all we have going for us is that we’re not twitter and we have +5 resistance to capitalism. And Xkit.

[deathlygristly]

About the empathy discussion:

I found comments on the thread by a self-proclaimed narcissist, and I liked the points that they made. That it's cool to not interact with people you don't feel comfortable around, but that it's not cool to dehumanize people. And then they shared examples of dehumanization that went way past anything I saw in my days of looking at survivors of narcissists blogs.

After the Bad Times, I was in a lot of pain and I was hurting and I'd had all my subconscious assumptions about my fellow humans exploded and I was angry. I don't know if I knew it back then but when I look at my old posts now, I can see deep hurt and confusion and a burning rage.

So I looked for explanations. I looked for something to make the experience make sense. And the only places I found people talking about similar things and who seemed to understand and who'd been through it too were blogs by abuse survivors, and they said that the disregard for their feelings and the smear campaigns and the cold calculations to ruin them came from things like narcissism. The behavior patterns that they described seemed to fit pretty well with what I'd observed from the ex-best friend.

Speaking of which, I have mostly tried to stay away from things in the news lately, but thinking about the bits I have seen....I guess the only way I could have had proof of the ex-best friend's abuse is if I'd screenshotted everything, but it took me a couple of years to realize that it was abuse so I didn't know I should be screenshotting it, and anyway even if I had you know that most bystanders would still have interpreted the screenshots as not a big deal or as he said/she said or me being too sensitive or "drama" or whatever, and they also wouldn't have seen it as a whole. Like it wasn't just one incident that I could point to and screenshot and say "Hey, this dude is emotionally abusive!" It was a pattern of subtle manipulation over time. Although actually, towards the end there were extended rants that might have worked as proof for some people.

Probably should have at least saved the voicemail he left after I defriended him once though, and figured out a way to post it. I didn't listen to it myself, but the spousal person did, and he said it was weird and disturbing. But at the time I was just like, no, get it away from me, delete it, block that number. I didn't realize I'd be expected to prove my pain to outsiders later. And also honestly I still didn't realize that it was abusive. Plus, my brain does not immediately default to "Record this private communication so you can go public with it later!" I have very strong anti-public shaming beliefs that get in the way of that thought occurring to me.

We need to change our standards of proof when it comes to abuse. There's enough research showing how abuse affects the brain. If the nature of abuse will always make it hard to have clear memories of the events and physical evidence and witness corroboration, then look for the markers of trauma in people's brains and bodies and behavior instead.

Of course that would still have the problems of getting people to believe that trauma is real, that it does actually show in your brain and body, that it can't be immediately gotten over with yoga or an inspiring Facebook meme, etc. And also showing that the trauma was caused by a particular thing, but maybe triggers would help with that? I can't fake the physical reaction I have to triggers when I'm not triggered.

There's also proving who actually did the action that resulted in the trigger, but most people are triggered by seeing their abuser or someone who looks like their abuser, right? I can't speak for anyone else but if it was ever necessary I'd be okay with getting hooked up to biometric machines and then being shown a lineup.

I'm sure there are many many problems with that idea, like one I just thought of is that not everyone who's been abused develops PTSD, and also a lot of people work through triggers and have less reaction to them over time, but it's a place to start thinking from about how to prove abuse.

Well, for the second group...I was going to say that their therapists should have records of their work on their triggers, but what about people who can't access therapy and who work on healing on their own and so they don't have official records?

Anyway, my point was that the blogs for survivors of relationships with narcissists were the only sources of information I had about what happened to me for a while there, and it made sense. The patterns fit, and it provided a reasonable explanation for how someone could engage in that pattern of behavior. And I was so angry.

Still though, wow, the examples of dehumanization that the person who says she's a narcissist brought up in that thread were hardcore, and I think that even back then if I'd seen those memes I would have been like, okay, this is going too far, this isn't healthy, and backed away.

So I wonder if part of what's going on is that those of us who have been emotionally abused by people who seem to lack empathy see people on Tumblr saying that it's ableist to have concerns about narcissists or psychopaths or whatever, and what we hear is that it's bad to have boundaries, that it makes you a bad person if you try to protect yourself from people who seem likely to harm you. But I guess on their side they could be coming from having seen the truly awful dehumanizing things that some people say, and that's what they're talking about more so than just boundaries and choosing to not be close friends with people who remind you of someone who abused you.

Also of course there definitely are abusers using the accusation of being ableist to manipulate their targets. "You can't have boundaries or leave me or not put up with my behavior, because expecting better from me and for yourself is ableist and bad." That's something to watch out for, and I guess those of us who have been manipulated before are more sensitive to that possible interpretation of discussions about ableism and lack of empathy.

I know the ex-best friend would have used that argument against me back in the day if he'd had the chance. He might be using it now, who knows. I mean, I hope he's forgotten that I exist, but it's possible that if discussions about me come up around him and people know who he is, he'd spin it that way. I'm the big bad ableist bigot, going around expecting decency and respect, and he's the poor hapless victim who just can't help his behavior, and it's all my fault.

I don't know. Like everything else, it's complicated and all you can do really is do the best you can with what you have available to you at the moment.

[tiredtiredgradstudent]

Critical Perspectives on New Media Habits

Katrin Tiidenberg’s blog is about cultural data/datafication of culture. The blog talks about how culture is not something that is readily available. Tiidenberg also talks about how datafication can alter culture. Culture is something that is constructed and then made sense of. How we define culture depends on if we use existing data or create new data. Then we come to cultural data in which sorting people, places, and ideas alters culture. So, are there other ways to datafy culture? Maybe we do need to produce alternative ways to understand culture. But it seems like a very daunting and overwhelming task when you think of the sheer amount of data that has already been collected about culture. Where would a person even start? And how would we come to a consensus on what gets to be datafied as culture? Our author believes this is something that can be created but it is a difficult concept, for me at least, to wrap my head around.  

Andre Brock focuses on the features of CMTs. Through research on Black Twitter, Brock concludes that ideologies are written into technology for legibility by users. This kind of makes sense as someone who frequently interacts with Black Twitter. This was strange to read because it is so ingrained in us that research should be replicable but this one explicitly says replicability is a false construct. So how are we supposed to have things like intercoder reliability or replication to show accuracy or validity?  

Rieger and Klimmt discuss eudaimonic memes. The most interesting part was that inspirational memes on Tumblr are a big part of eudaimonic experience and that eudaimonic messages are prevalent in social media. I was a huge fan of Tumblr for years and I rarely saw inspiration on there and I do not really see it on other social sites either which I guess is just a testament to the kind of person I am. It is even weirder that this was published in 2019 and I am almost positive Tumblr started to lose its popularity way before that. I do not think I have ever actually heard about connecting social media to people’s feelings of well-being. I have only heard the opposite, but I would really like to see how it does affect someone’s feelings of well-being. But memes bringing some of the same feelings as movies or videos is surprising. Also “digital inspiration” kind of sounds like the kinds of stuff that wine moms post on Facebook.  

Costa talks about social media in Turkey. These people keeping up 10+ Facebook accounts seems that it is something extreme that people go through to make sure that everyone in their lives is kept in the bubbles they are meant to be in. Context collapse is not even a thing here because of the extreme lengths to keep each part of life separate. It completely makes sense that it does not happen in other places but happens here. On top of the fact that we have a hugely different culture, posting on social media will not necessarily disgrace our families. It might but it is still different from the way it is talked about in Turkey. I also think we are just much lazier, less caring people than the people in Turkey so naturally context collapse will happen here. Would you go through the trouble of keeping up TWELVE Facebook accounts?

Jackson et al (2018), talk about #girlslikeus. While I see Twitter as a loud minority, it is great at building communities. Hashtags work better for Twitter than any other social platform. Much like the Black Lives Matter movement, the trans community was able to start their own discourse where people could use that hashtag to talk about anything that was related to trans women, particularly trans women of color. If I remember correctly, Twitter played a part in helping Chelsea Manning while she was in prison. The trans community was able to build and network and raise one another up and bring attention to lesser-known issues in the community that so often got swept under the rug like the violence committed against Cece McDonald. It also helps when celebrities like Laverne Cox are also in the mix.