#this stuff makes me much less willing to engage in public criticism

[bogunicorn]

I honestly think I would be more willing to engage with harsher critiques of Veilguard if so many of them didn't seem to include projecting malice or cowardice onto the developers and/or frankly really insulting blanket statements about how people who don't agree with said harsh critique are only disagreeing because they have a child's sense of fantasy and don't like feeling complicated emotions with consequences in their fiction.

Both of them annoy me but the idea of someone looking at me, of all people, and saying "well you don't agree with me because you want a story that puts you in a safe bubble that's never sad or conflicted or realistic" is absurd. Like, no, I just think some of the basis of your analysis is kind of bothersome and flawed because you keep assigning motivations to strangers and then arguing with a guy you personally made up, and my willingness to suspend disbelief and engage with a piece of fiction on its own terms isn't proof that I'm a baby or a coward just because it would make you feel smarter if that was the case.

And there is a world of difference between "the story's perspective softballs X or pulls punches with Y", and "the writers are cowards who don't want you to deal with consequences because there's something wrong with them artistically and morally". That's fucked up, projecting malice onto someone you don't know and whom all evidence suggests (both by their own words the last few months and by past storylines they've written for Dragon Age) would actually probably agree with your critiques and agree that they'd either done things different or had been ALLOWED to do things different. It ALSO makes for less coherent critiques because some of your analysis is based off of, frankly, an underlying motivation that is literally just made up of your own personal projection of what other real humans were thinking (which conveniently fits the narrative you already want to spin), rather than interrogating the perspective of the narrative itself on its own terms, where all of the pieces are fully available to you.

Works of fiction carry unintended perspectives all the time, it's a whole thing, and you can engage with that without assigning cruelty or cowardice or malicious stupidity to a small group of real human beings that you do not know and did their job in circumstances that we as fans will never know the extent of. You have no idea if "the devs" as you conceptualize them are actually at fault for the things you have such harsh feelings about, or why that thing happened or whatever, because big media projects like video games have hundreds of hands on them and many people making decisions whose names we will never know because they're just not pulling PR duty or whatever.

And when it comes to other fans, unless someone outright states their feelings on something, you actually don't know if any individual person agrees or disagrees with you for a good or bad reason about something as subjective and low stakes as a video game. Imagining that anyone who enjoys something that you don't as a dumb idiot baby too stupid to see what you see is pretty gross.

I am, as ever, not saying that anyone must like or dislike something, or that liking or disliking something means you're smarter or stupider than anyone else. It bothers me when analysis in these spaces seems to reserve all of its empathy for fictional characters and leaves little of it left for the actual people that are in these spaces or made the work that's being analyzed.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Rowe

* * * *

The power of not giving up!

November 15, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

After the preposterous nominations of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth1 on Wednesday, my inbox and the Comment section experienced a spike in reader comments that were a variation of, “This is too much! I give up. Democracy is done for!”

Those reactions are completely understandable. Trump has managed to exceed our worst fears for his cabinet picks. He did so again on Thursday by nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead Health & Human Services. Just weeks ago, RFK Jr. was too nutty and toxic for the Trump campaign, which had begun to distance itself from Kennedy, who believes that all vaccines are harmful, antidepressants are responsible for mass shootings, and COVID was engineered to target Caucasians and Blacks while sparing Ashkenazi Jews.

I get it. At this moment, it is easy to feel hopeless and powerless. That is the point of mind-numbing nominations that seek to place federal agencies under the control of unqualified hacks intent on destroying the agencies they will lead. The strongest defense against a psychological terror campaign designed to instill dread and provoke despair is to refuse to give up!

It is not a given that Trump's ludicrous nominees will be confirmed. Nor should we assume that they will be able to do their worst in agencies staffed with hundreds of thousands of qualified, dedicated public servants.

I am not saying that things won’t get bad. They will. I am saying that they will get worse if we give up merely because of threats and bluster by a man schooled in the dark arts of the long con and the Big Lie.

My favorite political writer, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, wrote about the dangers of giving up in advance. See The Most Pernicious Anticipatory Obedience Hides in Plain Sight, Talking Points Memo. (Although the discussion takes place in Josh’s paying members-only newsletter, this article should be accessible to all. My subscription to Talking Points Memo is the best investment I make.)

Marshall writes in part,

You may think there’s some kind of psychic or moral merit in jumping into every conversation and saying “No, it’s over! He said he was going to be a dictator! He said who he was! Believe him! Don’t be so naive!” But really that’s just rolling out a red carpet, the ultimate capitulation in advance. At the very least, put him to the task. Make him execute on what he’s trying to do. It won’t be easy and there are a lot of ways to make it even less easy. That’s the first role of a political opposition. [¶¶] [Giving up is] the most pernicious form of anticipatory obedience. Deciding that all of this stuff has already happened is not only inaccurate but self-defeating. It’s amplifying threats Trump hasn’t been able or willing to make good on. A better answer, both more effective and more dignified, is to say, “Okay, let’s see you try.” It’s not easy. There are lots of road blocks. It requires maintaining a lot of public support. It requires patience.

In citing Marshall’s essay, I do not mean to criticize anyone who wrote to me in exhaustion and fear today to say, “It’s too much. I give up. All is lost.” If that is how you feel, those feelings are understandable and firmly rooted in reality.

But as I responded to some readers today, “You don’t mean that. It is exhaustion and despair talking. You aren’t giving up. You and I both know that.”

There is power in the simple act of not giving up. Even if there is little that we can do in the moment to stop the ludicrous nominations and threats.

Do not give up. If the only thing you can muster is the will not to give up, that is enough—for now.

But we can do more than not giving up. We can engage in small acts of daily resistance. Make a phone call. Write a letter. Send a text or email. For those of you already involved in the grassroots movement, you know the drill.

If you are just joining the fight, there is no better place than Jessica Craven’s Chop Wood, Carry Water newsletter on Substack. Jessica’s daily column includes small acts that you can take to make your voice heard.

On Thursday, Jessica Craven’s newsletter included a script and directions for calling your representatives in Congress, urging them to reject the nomination of Matt Gaetz. Check it out!

Take a small action and feel the power of refusing to give up!

Recess appointments

As Trump's nominations become ever more ludicrous, the reason for his demand for recess appointments becomes clearer: Many of his nominees will never make it through the confirmation process. See Salon, "Totally unqualified": Congress reacts to RFK Jr. nomination.

When Trump first floated the idea of recess appointments, I assumed it was bluster. I now believe he is deadly serious. Senator John Thune, the new Majority Leader in the Senate, says that recess appointments are “still an option.”

The issue of recess appointments is complicated and nuanced. Previous presidents have made recess appointments, although the trend over the last two decades has been to block all recess appointments. See generally, Vox, Trump’s demand for recess appointments, explained.

But here is the constitutional takeaway about recess appointments: The rule is that nominations are confirmed by the Senate and recess appointments are the rare exception. Trump seeks to make the exception (recess appointments) the rule.

Whatever the history and nuances of recess appointments, no president has ever demanded that Congress go into recess for the purpose of circumventing the Senate’s obligation to provide “advice and consent” regarding presidential nominations. See Can  the  President  Adjourn  Congress? - ConstitutionNEXT.

Trump's demand that the Senate abdicate its constitutional duty is the first step in abolishing the constitutional system of checks and balances. If Republicans agree to surrender the constitutional oversight role of Congress, they are co-conspirators in an effort to overthrow the Constitution.

Don’t let anyone tell you that Trump's demand that the Senate go into recess is consistent with historical norms. It is not. Trump's demand is outrageous and should be condemned by every member of Congress and every responsible media outlet in the nation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a danger to America’s health

Trump's nomination of RFK Jr. crossed another line of sanity and decency. Kennedy is a dangerous, unserious, deeply flawed choice who will imperil the health of Americans if he is confirmed. See The Guardian, RFK Jr condemned as ‘clear and present danger’ after Trump nomination.

Per The Guardian,

Public Citizen, a progressive nonprofit organization focusing on consumer advocacy, said: “Robert F Kennedy Jr is a clear and present danger to the nation’s health. He shouldn’t be allowed in the building at the department of health and human services (HHS), let alone be placed in charge of the nation’s public health agency.” “Donald Trump’s bungling of public health policy during the Covid pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of lives. By appointing Kennedy as his secretary of HHS, Trump is courting another, policy-driven public health catastrophe,” the organization added. Alastair McAlpine, a pediatric physician at British Columbia’s children’s hospital, wrote: “It is hard to overstate what a terrible decision this is. RFK Jr has no medical training. He is a hardcore anti-vaccine and misinformation peddler. The last time he meddled in a state’s medical affairs (Samoa), 83 children died of measles.”

Despite the danger presented by Kennedy, no congressional Republicans have gone on record criticizing Kennedy. To the contrary, they have described him as “brilliant” and “exciting.” It is despicable that Republicans would play politics with the health of America’s children, elderly, and vulnerable.

Update on Matt Gaetz

Shock over Matt Gaetz’s nomination continues. One reason (among many) are allegations that Gaetz was involved in moving underage girls across state lines for sex. On Thursday, the attorney for one of those underage girls spoke out. See Newsweek, Lawyer for Teenager at Center of Matt Gaetz Investigation Speaks Out.

Per Newsweek, the girl’s lawyer said,

Mr. Gaetz's likely nomination as Attorney General is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events. We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report. She was a high school student and there were witnesses.

It is bewildering and maddening that a president-elect who is an adjudicated sexual abuser nominated a man under investigation for transporting underage girls across state lines for sex to be the Attorney General of the United States. Most of the Trump voters who are parents of teenage daughters would not allow their daughters to remain alone in the same room with Trump or Gaetz. And yet, they voted for Trump.

Concluding Thoughts

It has been a tough week. Part of the reason is that we can’t play defense yet. We are simply waiting as Trump makes one outrageous announcement after another. I admit to feeling frustrated. Over the summer, the Biden and Harris campaigns raised the alarm about the anti-democratic, revenge-based agenda planned by Trump. Pundits and scolds warned that “democracy issues” were not resonating with voters and Democrats needed to shift to “kitchen table issues.”

Kamala Harris made a masterful pivot to policies focusing on the middle and working classes. Those campaign themes gained some traction, but not enough. And now we are faced with the anti-democratic, revenge-based agenda that many warned was coming. That agenda is surprising Trump supporters and some Democrats. And it is worse than we imagined.

We can’t change the past, but we can learn from it. There is no such thing as raising the alarm about Trump's dictatorial aspirations too loudly or frequently. We must resist every step of the way.

I have largely abandoned the NYTimes as a source of news. Today, as I was fact-checking this newsletter, I clicked on my icon for the NYT, expecting to see full-throated condemnation of Trump's ridiculous anti-government, anti-science, anti-America nominations. Instead, I saw David Brooks (still) explaining to Democrats how they (allegedly) blew it. At some point, Brooks will have to find something new to write about. I suggest he start with an alleged child sex trafficker heading the DOJ, an anti-science anti-vaxxer heading HHS, a Putin-friendly neophyte heading the DNI, and a white nationalist heading the DOD.

While there is power in not giving up, at some point we need to rouse righteous anger about what is happening to America. It is not right. It is not acceptable. And we should not let it happen on our watch.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[ms-demeanor]

Some meandering thoughts about jokes about rape and cultural changes in the last decade and a half

Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad we’re in a place now where we DO question rape jokes and it would be much harder to get away with “raping Jonah Hill is incredibly amusing” as the center of a scene the way that you could in 2007-2013 but I do kind of feel like we don’t talk about how sudden that change was enough.

People talk about how you should have always known that awful things are awful but if you’re surrounded by rape jokes and pedophilia jokes all the time and that’s what’s funny to the other kids around you and the adults in your lives and what makes up the jokes in the movies you watch then it’s hard to act like you always knew it was wrong.

Dead baby jokes were a HUGE thing when I was a teen and in my early twenties and sitting around swapping dead baby jokes was just a thing we did, and tossed in among them were things like:

A joke about incest with the punchline “Get off me pa, you’re crushing my smokes.”

This joke about a pedophile murdering a child.

Let’s not turn this rape into a murder.

And hell, look at the activity graph for “soap on a rope” on urban dictionary:

2014 starts a significant taper.

Letterboxd has their “sexual assault against men played for comedy page” and if you sort by release date there’s a downward trend with 2014 as a really stand-out year for rape jokes about men in popular movies:

2010 - 10

2011 - 12

2012 - 14

2013 - 12

2014 - 18 (jesus, which includes a prison rape joke in “Paddington”)

2015 - 9

2016 - 9

2017 - 11

2018 - 15

2019 - 4

2020 - 1

(this is of course with the caveat that this is only what has been documented so far)

Shock porn sites used to be a thing and they used to be a COMMON thing. A thing that would get remixed and have late night hosts make jokes about them and that got parody music videos.

So on the one hand I was really glad that in 2010 the hacker conference WASN’T asking me to make a rape joke on their tee shirt, but since Pool 2 Girl came up at every single “this is what defcon is about” discussion and some of the guys from the con had printed up “lemonparty.org” stickers to slap up around town it wouldn’t have been *surprising* if they’d been asking for that.

If you were a teenager in 2005 would you have known how much of a dick move goatse-ing people was? We didn’t have the same culture of trigger warnings (not that I disapprove of trigger warnings, they are good and I like them) and there was very much an attitude online at the time of “if you can’t handle it log off.”

I think the fappening was the turning point for a lot of this stuff - I think that was a big cultural moment that changed a lot of people’s attitudes really quickly and I’m seeing echos of that with what Chris Evans is dealing with right now: people are a lot faster to say “oh, that sucks, don’t be an asshole, report people for posting the pics” while I remember sitting and arguing in an imgur thread because there were a bunch of people saying “if you don’t like it don’t take nudes” about the celebrities who got caught in the icloud leak.

People look at Shane Dawson’s (admittedly gross and incredibly inappropriate) behavior with a poster of Willow Smith and act like it’s unprecedented***** but as someone who remembers not only Olsen Eighteenth Birthday countdowns but ALSO the jokes about fucking the Olsen twins that came BEFORE they were legal that’s just bizarre. Seeing people my age and older react to James Gunn’s pedophilic twitter jokes like they’re worse than Jay Leno’s jokes about Michael Jackson (which were made on TV! Across America! On a major network!) is just. It’s bizarre.

I’m glad we are where we are now, I’m glad that making rape jokes in public or jokes about incest or pedophilia (or murder or abortion) is less common and less okay (especially in children’s media, jesus fuck) and more likely to get criticized.

But I’m also pretty sure I’m going to get called a rape apologist by *someone* for saying “2010 was a different time, rape jokes were more common and we didn’t realize how shitty it was” when it really was a different time and rape jokes were more common and most people didn’t realize how shitty it was. I sure didn’t. I do now, and I’m glad I do now. But pretending that we should have ALWAYS known this, pretending that this was NEVER acceptable, pretending that it WASN’T a different time is ignoring the fact that for over a decade there was an entire genre of pedophilic rape jokes (that were frequently also racist) centered around one celebrity and that people told these jokes in public and in pop culture *all the time.*

Does that make it right? Fuck, I don’t know, shit is relative. It was still largely acceptable to electrocute gay kids and people tossed around the word “faggot” pretty freely. Mean Girls is full of jokes about how awful it is for people to think you’re a lesbian and Superbad is full of jokes about getting people shitfaced so they’ll sleep with you (so date rape) and there’s an entire “cute comedy” from the 80s starring Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn that’s an extended rape-by-fraud joke. I think that as a whole we’re better now as people than we were in 2010 and the 90s and the 80s and the 50s and I don’t think that someone who made a sexist joke in the 80s is irredeemably evil and I don’t think people making rape jokes in the 2010s are rape apologists in 2020 and I wish there was a lot more understanding of both history and nuance in these conversations.

*****to be very, very clear Shane Dawson has been filmed kissing underage fans on the mouth and having explicit sexual conversations with his very young cousin - Dawson has done things that go beyond “inappropriate” and fall clearly into “wrong” “bad” “dangerous” “illegal” etc, which is all the more reason that it’s so strange to see people focusing on him fake masturbating on a poster of Willow Smith. YES doing that was gross but why is it even being compared to the way he’s been filmed interacting with fans? The lack of nuance, making “fake masturbating at a poster” and “creating a sexually abused puppet character” the same as “inappropriately touched and kissed minor fans and engaged a young child in explicit sexual conversations” is NOT GOOD. That is a bad thing. Two of those things are tasteless and two of those things are actively harmful and it’s the actively harmful stuff that we should be focusing on and part of why it’s really weird to see shit like “pizzagate conspiracist accuses James Gunn of making inappropriate jokes” like yes Gunn please don’t but can we maybe refocus and talk about the dude who can be pretty significantly assigned blame for a fucking shooting? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/01/james-gunn-alt-right-marvel-film-director-tweets

Actually, you know what, I thought I was done ranting, I’m not.

It’s purity culture.

YES you should attempt to do less harm with your language, YES you should attempt to not use slurs, YES you should try to avoid making rape jokes. But there’s an entire huge group of people who are willing to drag up rape jokes from a decade when rape jokes were REALLY REALLY common in order to say that nothing you say or do today matters.

And that same group is ALSO really interested in expanding the concept of what pedophilia is to include age differences in adults or liking the wrong style of drawing and it’s a purity culture silencing tactic and can we PLEASE stop pretending that gross, tasteless jokes are the same thing as actually sexually abusing people? Can we stop pretending that pointing out “rape jokes were more common fifteen years ago and I feel bad about it but that’s just the way it was and I don’t make jokes like that anymore” is the same as saying “rape isn’t bad and you shouldn’t make a big deal out of it.”

It’s always good to try to be a less shitty human but if you’re only allowed to grow and improve and be less shitty if you never fucked up in the first place then it’s all just calvinist bullshit and none of us could ever really be saved in the first place.

I dunno, dudes. We got so careful about disapproving of the wrong kind of language that we let a white supremacist concern troll Disney into firing a director who caught the attention of the alt right by shit-talking the president.

I think perhaps we need to reexamine some strategy here.

[tutuandscoot]

I'm the og anon that brought up how people treated vm lol. I agree with everything you said. They really were like animals in a cage. I hate that people made them feel they have to hide anything. And all the crazy narratives, sometimes I cant believe what people came up with. It seems like they thought both tessa and scott were terrible people who would do these terrible things. How can you be a fan of someone and think they would cheat or intentionally hurt their best friend. It is kinda scary to think how invested these people were. I am all for thinking they are cute, but if they say they aren't involved i believe them. They never gave me a reason to doubt their sincerity and i honestly think it is disrespectful to question them at every turn. People asked their friends and family about it, going as far as bullying them for saying or posting something that didn't fit into the narrative. They made their private lives a spectacle. Also they criticized their tour and their skating, trying to find anything to throw back at them. Saying they skated badly because they broke up or whatever. And i am pissed because i honestly believe we could have had more tours if people hadn't crossed so many boundaries. Imagine all the programs we could have had if they continued skating. 😭😭😭 All in all thank you for being a voice of reason. I also try to ignore all the bad things that happened in this fandom and just try to support vm in all they do, they deserve it 🥺

Thanks Anon ❤️❤️ it is 1000% what T&S deserve that we speak of and admire them with love and kindness because that’s what they give all of us and each other. I do manage to ignore all the negativity and choose not to engage with it, and guess it’s just nice to put all that in the past. The best thing about being here now is there’s so much less to question and if there are still people here spreading hate then that’s pretty sad for them 😝

I do think there was the chance of getting more tours with them if not for this stuff, but part of me also thinks they had a plan and 2years of skating post pyc was what the plan was for a while. I guess it’s likely they may have done SOI in 2019 if not for some of this, but I guess there’s really no way to know. I can’t imagine this stuff not making its way back to them, especially if people were harassing their friends and family (which WTAF that is the dumbest, most horrible thing I can imagine happening to all these people. Scum of the earth I’m telling you🤬) so if it did indeed play a part that is just infuriating.

And while cyber bullying like this is impossible not to the affect even the strongest people, I do think it wouldn’t ever have affect their true feelings for each other or affect their friendship in any major way. They had been through hell and back multiple times through some of the toughest stages of their lives none the less through their partnership, and the always made it through the other side closer than they were before. They are so strong willed and committed to always maintaining their love. But as I said I think it’s definitely likely all this shit caused them to retreat from the public eye in order to protect each other.

Also, I don’t think having them on tv as much as their agents had them was a good thing- it just gave the trolls more fuel to throw on the fire. Yes they had to go on to promote TTYCT but I feel like they were on a lot of TV shows, news/ morning shows that they didn’t need to be on- it was just coz after pyc they were the hot gossip and everyone wanted a piece of them, everyone wanted to be in their presence to see if they could actually see this so called “secret romantic relationship”. It’s horrible that the conversation got away from their career achievements and instead was about all this relationship crap that literally didn’t even exist the way (most people) wanted it to. So yeh, in retrospect I think that didn’t help- and because they are who they are, they probably didn’t think all this objectification was even happening until it got so toxic and started affecting them directly, and the damage was done 😖.

So yes! Let’s proceed with love and positivity❤️

[himboarcher]

reasons i've seen folks say that grad critics hate grad:

they hate travis (in fairness, i’ve def seen some comments of people shitting on trav for the sake of shitting on trav, but it’s not super common and typically gets downvoted into oblivion on reddit.)

it's not balance / travis isn't griffin (???????)

they hate neurodivergent people (again, in fairness, i have seen a handful of comments that could come across this way! but most of the time when travis being ADHD or his NPD is brought up, it's by defenders saying that criticizing travis is ableist because he's neurodivergent or, in one particular comment, infantilizing him bc of it and literally comparing grad to putting a kid's artwork on the fridge. there were some comments early on that pointed to him being a narcissist as the reason for things people disliked about grad, but everyone seems to have realized that that's a shitty train of thought and left it behind.)

they're just toxic haters (again, there are a small handful of people like this because this is the internet, but the genuine criticism greatly outweighs their bullshit. i 100% think that the people, which is mostly just one dude who is also insufferable on reddit, who have been responding rudely to positive tweets under the episode announcements lately are out of line and need to stop. there's been an influx of that lately, presumably because people are frustrated that after over a year of grad going on, there's been no improvement to most of the major issues. that's still no excuse to be a dick to folks, though.)

vs some of the actual reasons i don't like grad:

the racism / racist tropes, and the way that they’ve straight up ignored this criticism and will likely never acknowledge it. pretty wild considering a core tenet of their brand is their willingness to acknowledge when they’ve messed up and do their best to course correct.

clumsy attempts at inclusion that are shallow and often end up being fairly offensive ("...ask me about my wheelchair," anyone?)

on a related note: i don't think that travis had bad intentions, but as an nonbinary person, it feels othering to me that travis only has enby characters give others their pronouns unprompted. i'm thinking specifically of kai here. having listened to their introduction, i don't think it's as bad or awkward as some people have said, but i can't remember travis ever having another NPC tell the PCs their pronouns, especially not a cis character. it's not a huge deal, but it's something that rubbed me the wrong way. admittedly, i don't think it would bother me so much if travis hadn't dropped the ball so much with performative inclusion in the past.

okay i'm putting the rest under a read more because even without getting into all of the problems i have with it, this got Long.

little to no player agency. player choices are ultimately meaningless and have little to no effect on the world. even when he seems to go along with a plan they come up with, it always ends with them having to go back to travis' pre-written script (see: subpoenaing the xorn, but not really because they had to go with travis' original plan of "send the xorn home through the rift".) the players repeatedly get told things about what they think or feel or what they've been doing to an unnecessary degree. fitzroy is the only one who really gets space to play and decide things for himself, and that's only because travis has decided he's the main character.

the NPCs are all too nice and willing to give the PCs anything they ask for and more, unless the PCs are trying to follow their own plan and then the NPCs are completely useless. but honestly, aside from gray, all of the NPCs are just.... nice. travis refuses to even let his antagonists be mean or cruel or even more than just slightly rude, because that'd be a bummer and we don't want that! the "twist" of gordy the lich king actually being polite and chill is not a twist at all because everyone is like that in this world. the NPCs are also wildly overpowered, but then suddenly absolutely useless when the PCs actually want their help.

too many cliffhangers that are dropped immediately at the beginning of the next episode. i feel bad for travis because so many of these cliffhangers actually set up good momentum and seemed like things were gonna get interesting, but almost every single time he just dropped them at the beginning of the next episode. like when althea showed up to interview the boys and the next episode started with travis being like "actually you went to sleep, she said she'll be back tomorrow!"

that time travis specifically said in his exposition dump that the thundermen left their horses behind because they thought the centaurs might be offended by them riding horses, only to later on rag on them for being surprised that the centaurs had horses they could ride.....

also the centaur arc in general, but i already listed racism above, so.

the way that the toxic positivity and parasocial tendencies in the mcelroy fandoms have made a large portion of the fandom take ANY criticism as a personal attack on travis and/or on themselves for enjoying something others consider bad, either morally or just quality-wise. it’s okay to admit that something you like has problematic elements or just isn’t as good as it once was. you can and should engage critically with the media you consume.

related to above: the way travis has handled genuine criticism, which is to throw public tantrums on his twitter or make weird passive aggressive tweets & ultimately ignore all the genuine criticism and advice he's been offered by claiming it's all subjective, even after he specifically asked for it and set up an email for folks to send in genuine, objective advice for him (after he threw a tantrum on twitter and replied to someone's criticism publicly, which resulted in his followers dogpiling on that person bc how dare they insult their internet best friend). while i was writing this last night, he actually announced that he’s taking a break from Twitter and acknowledged that he’s been using it as an echo chamber where he can easily get validation from folks, and honestly i’m happy for him that he’s recognized this problem and is stepping away for a while! i hope he’ll genuinely use this time to reflect on how he’s been behaving and find a more healthy way to use social media. i’m leaving this point in because i think his Twitter being such a positive echo chamber was encouraging him to do stuff like this, and him somewhat acknowledging his behavior doesn’t mean it can no longer be discussed.

rainer. extremely cool concept in theory and i was very into it until that awkward "does anyone want to ask about my wheelchair?" moment. also when travis had her use her mobility aid to RAM INTO A DOOR instead of just fucking knocking???? also all the times travis has tried to force a romantic relationship between her and fitzroy, despite fitzroy displaying no interest in her in that way. also, just to clarify: as an ace person, i don’t think this is aphobic! (and it’s kind of a stretch to call it that imo, especially since griffin never explicitly said that fitzroy's aromantic!) i just think it’s weird and awkward and a little uncomfortable for me personally, mostly because it reminds me of the times i’ve been in similar situations.

less of a problem than a lot of the other stuff and more just bad writing, but the forced emotional moments. in general, nothing in grad feels earned (why are the boys heading a war? when they have multiple actual heroes with combat experience on their side and a supposedly powerful secret organization? and the thundermen are like 21 years old max and have only had like ~10 fights in the entire campaign?) but there've been a couple times where travis has tried to force unearned emotional moments, presumably because he knows people enjoyed those with the last campaigns. but the difference is that in balance, the big emotional moments happened because they were earned. in grad, it's just travis throwing a baby pegasus at us for a few minutes and then the next time she shows up, it's supposed to be a tearful goodbye.

there are absolutely no stakes. remember when the thundermen got told that if they left, gray would kill 10 students? and then they left and came back and it turns out that what gray actually meant was, "i'll tie ten students who are mostly nameless NPCs to a tree and throw some dogs at them that you can easily stop in time, then throw a tantrum because how dare you but i'll leave before you can really do anything to hurt me lol" travis did have fitzroy's magic get taken away, but like. it didn't really do anything? also all he had to get it back was be coerced into using drugs by an authority figure and trip in the woods?

we're told that the school is weird and the hero system is corrupt, but the world of nua is still presented as more of a liberal utopia than anything? althea getting fired because of a corrupt villain is the only time we've somewhat seen corruption, but even then, she was still allowed to get (what seems to me, anyway, but admittedly i don't know for sure bc nothing about the HOG makes much sense) a fairly important job from the very people who stripped her of her hero license or whatever the fuck heroes need?

travis doesn't actually seem to understand how capitalism or bureaucracy works and just chalks up everything to "red tape." also more on the rest of the boys than him specifically, but the "let's destroy capitalism!" thing turning into just pushing some filing cabinets over................... okay.

and one last piece of extremely subjective criticism: it's just kind of.... boring. i think a lot of people, myself included, would be willing to overlook 90% of the problems with graduation if it didn't feel like such a slog to get through.

also people saying that we can't or shouldn't criticize graduation because it's "free" is absolutely absurd for several reasons. first, something being free does not make it above criticism. second, there ARE people who directly financially support the show with monthly donations. three, there's a difference between something being free and something being not for profit. podcasting is their full time job. they make their living off of money made from TAZ and MBMBAM (and probably their other shows to a lesser extent). this not a fun home game that they are graciously recording and sharing with us. it is a product they are producing that they make money off of, both from ads in the episodes and merch & books based off of these podcasts. they have marketed themselves as professionals, and both griffin and travis have been on panels where they are marketed as professional DMs and appear alongside other professional DMs (which makes it incredibly frustrating when people say that travis is just a newbie DM and we can't criticize him because of that. if he's a newbie, then he should not be taking part of panels as a professional DM where he speaks as an expert). TAZ is free in the same way that an episode of NCIS is free. i may not pay for it directly, but the creators are paid to create it and profit off of me consuming this product. so saying we should be grateful for any mcelnoise that the benevolent good boys share with us and that we're not allowed to criticize it "because it's free" is absolutely wild.

[shihalyfie]

“I know it has its problems, but...“

Since we’re at a whole 21 years since the series first aired, I think it’s about time we address this, but: as a 02 fan, I would like to ask other 02 fans that we stop saying this.

It’s no secret that if you’re a 02 fan, you’re probably used to hearing the fanbase constantly trash-talk it for various reasons, ranging from petty things like the infamous over-pedestaling of Adventure, to more substantial criticisms of its writing. Generally speaking, you’ll hear complaints like: the characters are underdeveloped, the plot doesn’t make sense, et cetera. Quite understandably, 02 fans don’t usually have the energy to argue back about it, and tend to preface discussions of liking the series with things like “I know it has its problems, but...” so they can preliminarily get people off their back and stave off the “you like 02? But it’s so bad!” lashback before it happens.

The problem is that I think this constant reinforcement of “yeah I acknowledge it had its problems” -- as in, without even being prompted and being said solely as a way to “justify” your like of the series -- has actually made the problem unnecessarily worse, in that it validates people’s assertions that 02 was a bad series and that everyone who likes it only likes it "because they do”, and not because there were things that spoke to them about it. It’s one thing if 02 criticisms are being brought up in a context where criticism is actually appropriate, or if a fan actually is in the mood to vent about the problems, but if we’re just talking about a context where being critical contributes nothing productive to the discussion, there’s not a lot of good that can come from constantly “admitting” that it has problems at a time like that, because it just continues enabling the idea of the series remaining in public memory with the stigma associated with it by default. In effect, it’s led to this “brainwashing” phenomenon where mantras like “the 02 characters didn’t get any development” are repeated and merged into public memory like they’re law, and because people don’t question it, it ends up getting passed around further, and reinforced even more, and the cycle continues.

Part of the reason I’ve been writing so much for this blog is that I feel like this series is very misunderstood, especially in terms of the idea they did get character development and that a lot of the plot beats make more sense when you think of them more from a thematic and emotional point of view than an adventure-and-action story point of view, and that perhaps the real issue was more that they were too subtle in communicating those things, so they often went over the audience’s heads. Intrinsically, I think a lot of 02 fans actually do understand that these elements were present, even if they can’t vocalize it -- that’s why we as fans gravitated towards the series, after all -- but because it’s too exhausting to argue back about it, it’s easier to just “agree” that there were serious problems and act like the series is some kind of guilty pleasure.

It’s true that 02 does have a lot of issues in its writing, but so does every other Digimon series, and so does every other series or piece of media in this world, and it’s not like you have to preface talking about all of the other things you like with “I know it has its problems, but...”, right? There’s a whole theory about media being able to still hit emotionally even when its plot writing is sloppy, of which 02 is not the first and most certainly is not the last of. This is especially because I think, in modern years, as more people have gained an adult’s perspective and are able to pick up on all of the things that went over their heads when they first watched it as kids, people are starting to retroactively understand that there was something in it that was special, despite everything else about it. (There have certainly been multiple testimonies from people who have said that, upon rewatching, they’ve come to understand the heavy thematic importance of what it was trying to say.)

This does not mean that I think everyone should like the series, or that it’s unreasonable that people will dislike it. If it is true that it didn’t communicate its intent well, that’s an issue in itself, and I don’t think people should be obligated to rewatch things they’re not interested in, much less try and pick it apart with a pair of tweezers. If it didn’t sit with them, then it didn’t. But if you look at staff interviews and testimony about 02 and all of the thought that went behind its lore and storytelling, there’s more than enough evidence that the creators of the series put a ton of thought and care into what they wanted to say, even if it wasn’t fully communicated, and a lot of people like 02 no matter how many of its detractors want to claim that it’s disposable (the reception to the 02 characters in Kizuna should demonstrate that more than well enough), and it’s most likely because people were able to catch onto that -- so it pains me to see it so easily dismissed and equated with being “the bad guilty pleasure series” just because the mantra of it being “bad” has been taken for granted.

And, for goodness’s sake, it’s been more than 20 years, and this is a series that was inherently about the unhealthiness of drowning in regrets of “it should have been like this” or whatnot instead of thinking productively about what it did provide and moving forward with it. There’s definitely a time to bring up criticisms when they’re relevant to the discussion, but there are also times when it’s simply not necessary and doesn’t help anything at all. Is an anniversary fanart meant to wax positively about what this series means to the artist really a place to be putting a disclaimer about the series’s writing problems like it’s some kind of review blog?

All I’m asking is, basically, that people who like 02 be a bit more unapologetic about liking it. If someone gives you grief for liking it like it’s some kind of sin, that’s their problem for being an insensitive jerk and denying your right to have preferences, not on you for liking something “bad”. And if someone does have more thoughtful criticisms that you happen to disagree with, there’s no problem in actually declaring that you disagree with those criticisms -- this is easier said than done because of how exhausting it is to fight against such a reinforced mantra like this, but at the very least, you can say that you respectfully disagree with those criticisms instead of “caving” to it just because the fanbase treats it as law. I’ve written my meta mainly because I understand that this series can be frustratingly obtuse, and putting it in easy-to-understand words that people can pass around will instigate proper discussion of the series (especially in regards to the characters, whom I feel are much more complex than they’re given credit for), but it doesn’t even really have to be my meta, since it’s only my way of seeing it and I’m sure others may see it differently. I do it because I hope it’s helpful, but I’d honestly be happy as long as 02 fans (and even possibly not-quite-fans but still open-minded people) would at least be willing to engage in thoughtful discussion about whether all of the stuff the fanbase has been saying ad nauseam for two decades is actually true, or whether there’s more to it beyond the surface.

I don’t expect this single Tumblr post, or even all of my meta, to end up having that huge of an impact against the decades of fanbase echo chambering, but I would appreciate it if 02 fans reading this could take this to heart, encourage other 02 fans they know to do the same, and, most importantly, feel a little less ashamed about liking this series.

[trashmancer]

Again, been reading a lot recently, and here's some recent reads and my thoughts. (All very spoiler-free)

Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard

I'd heard about this series for a while, but had always kept putting off reading it, and finally I was in the mood for some comedic (yet dark) shenanigans--and a villain protagonist as charming as Johannes Cabal really hit me just right. I really enjoyed the first of this series and the introduction to this 1920's-ish universe similar-yet-different to our own that Howard's created. His writing is crisp and clever--and Johannes is a villain protagonist worth cheering for. He's duplicitous, arrogant, and cold, yet sharp-witted and competent enough to be engaging, and even though he's amoral (driven predominately with an "ends do justify the means" mentality) there are glimmers of a conscious buried in there.

The basic gist of the first book is that Johannes Cabal is a necromancer dead-set (ba-dum-sh) on thwarting the biggest plague affecting mankind: Death. As such, he's willing to go to extreme lengths to hone and perfect his necromantic abilities. In the pursuit of this knowledge, Cabal sold his soul to Satan, but he comes to realize he actually needs his soul for his necromancy to work more properly (apparently without a soul it gets very unpredictable). In order to win his soul back, he strikes a wager with Satan: he will accumulate 100 souls for Satan in return for his own. Satan, ever the fair player (not), gifts Cabal with an infernal carnival to help Cabal reach his goal within the year. Shenanigans ensue.

While I read some books in-between this one and the next in the series, I'll write about the other here--

Johannes Cabal: The Detective by Jonathan L. Howard

So clearly I enjoyed the first installment enough to keep going, and I am glad, because I enjoyed the second one even more than the first. It feels like Howard got more comfortable with the characters and world than before, and in this one he expands his universe with some made-up countries that are similar-to-yet-different than countries on our Earth. In this one, Cabal does less fantastic tricks, as he dons the role of investigator (there's been a murder--on an airship!), but the plot was very fun. I will say this is one of the first books in a long while to genuinely make my world-weary ass laugh out loud in public. Howard truly does know how to turn a phrase and comes off with some great witticisms.

Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky has been on my radar for a while because I have had Children of Time on my reading list for what feels like an age (and I still haven't gotten around to reading it, but I will soon). To prime myself, I looked up other works by Tchaikovsky. This was around the time I was look for good "stand-alone" Adult Fantasy novels as well, so the two linked up and I had this on my TBR for a while and got around to finally cracking it open.

I really loved this book. If I could describe it in any way, it would be sort of like Pride & Prejudice if Elizabeth Bennet got drafted into a war. Seriously. That's how it reads--and Tchaikovsky made the allusions to Austen's work very clear. The setting is very English-inspired, and the time period mimics Napoleonic times. Definitely the first "Flintlock Fantasy" I've had the pleasure of reading.

The themes of the book are about the caustic nature of nationalism, the blurring of truth during war, and what is true patriotism in the face of falsehood and horror. Definitely my kind of questions--and I love watching characters thrown into completely unfamiliar environments. A genteel woman (Emily Marshwic) being tossed headfirst into grisly, mosquito-infested swamps armed with a musket? It's a fascinating journey she undergoes.

Plus the novel featured a romantic subplot that hits my enemies-to-lovers buttons hard. (It's not at all like one of those tired YA enemies-to-lovers stories, but something more grown-up and messy, which I approve of, because I love drama.) But this is more of a personal note. It's definitely not going to be for everyone.

Retribution Falls (Tales of the Ketty Jay #1) by Chris Wooding

After Johannes Cabal, I got into the mood for some steampunk, and I hadn't actually read much in the way of steampunk, so I looked up some recs and the Tales of the Ketty Jay series seemed to appear on a lot of lists for this kinda thing. The basic gist of this one is... imagine steampunk Firefly. That kinda gives you the whole vibe and feel. It's about a crew of disparate and colorful characters all running from something who meet on the ship the Ketty Jay and have to learn to work together to survive.

Overall, it was a fast-paced read (I read this 400 page sucker in a single day--while doing other stuff) and Wooding knows how to write action and interesting character interactions. The world had some glimmers of brilliance (the wizard analogs in their world--daemonist--were the most intriguing part), but otherwise it was very typical steampunk. I had no real quibbles with any of that (aside from the fact some of it read as very cliche and Wooding's inspirations seemed a little obvious--Fullmetal Alchemist and Firefly being the two big ones that kept hammering me over the head), but my main complaint was with the writing and treatment of female characters. First, there is only one main female character in the Ketty Jay's crew--Jez. I had no real issues with Jez's character or writing (in fact she's refreshing in some ways), but she's completely isolated from any other female characters (and is also the only crew member who isn't really allowed to be a complete screw up--she's somewhat sanitized, which, I guess the heroic women characters aren't allowed to be fuck ups like the men?). Second, the other predominate female characters, of whom there are only three, are mute/dehumanized (Bess), characterized as stupid and unhinged (Amalicia), and have rape-as-a-backstory-written-TERRIBLY (Trinica). All that said, as much as it was cringe, this was written in 2009, and I am sure Wooding has had some growth as a writer since then.

I liked this one enough to decide to check out the next in the series (even knowing the writing for the female characters leaves much to be desired).

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

A Fantasy taking place in an Americas-inspired world? Absolutely refreshing (and more please). The main gist of this one is that a cult sets out to resurrect a dead god (seriously that's the main plot crux) while political machinations are going on in the central city of this country where the resurrection is going to take place. As the novel progresses, it's like a countdown clock to game time. There's four POV characters we follow: Xiala (a Teek sea captain who is kind of an outcast from her native people and has a love for beautiful people), Serapio (the man who has been groomed since birth to be the vessel for the resurrected god, part of this process has included blinding him), Naranpa (the Sun Priest of the capital city who is trying to garner back control the priesthood has lost), and Okoa (who really doesn't even appear until way later into the book; he's been separated from his family to train to be a warrior). For the most part, I was primarily engaged (re: 90% engaged) with Xiala and Serapio's story. They were the most interesting characters, and the journey of them on the sea trying to get to the city before the ceremony was exciting and emotional. The political dealings in Naranpa's segments kind of bogged down the action--and I didn't feel anything for that. Overall though, definitely a thrilling read with a beautifully constructed world. If I had one big criticism, it's that it ended incredibly abruptly without any resolution. I knew going in this was a part of a greater whole, but I still felt the ends could've been knotted a little tighter. I'm left dangling! But I'll be sure to pick up the next one (if anything just to find out what happens to Xiala and Serapio).

Vicious by V.E. Schwab

As an unapologetic villainfucker, I had to read this one, right? It's about not just one, but two villains! How could I lose? And they're in an intense rivalry? Revenge? Betrayal? Superpowers? Gah! Be still my heart!

I'll say I enjoyed this book (fun characters, solid writing), but I didn't love it as much as I thought I would (I wish I could love yooouuuu!). Definitely worth a recommendation to anyone who loves villains and fast-paced narratives, but... there were a few things that tarnished what could've been sparkling. The biggest for me was the jumping around in the first half. For a length of time, the novel leaps between three different points of time, sometimes 2-3 pages at a time, and it was jarring (not confusing, mind you, but it was a jolt each time). I get it was done to create an air of mystique and intrigue, but it felt like I was getting dragged around by the ear. Along with this, the plot just seemed... very convenient? As various moments kept happening, it all felt too tidy and paint-by-numbers. The characters were certainly messy and fun (and I love messy and fun), but the action itself seemed to glide on well-oiled rails with no hiccups. This did lead to the magnetic pacing of the book (which I also read in a day), but it didn't do the drama any favors. Never once did it feel like the characters were caught with their pants down--and I think that's part of the point, but it kind of dampened the tension.

I liked it enough I am definitely going to check out the sequel Vengeful though. If anything I am reading for Sydney, Mitch, and Victor. I gotta know what happens to them!

--

Right now I am reading some fluffy fluff to cleanse my palette because I've been reading so much moodiness. I'm mid-way through the light and breezy Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater (and it's super cute so far) and then I am finally going to crack open Andy Weir's The Martian (because I have put off reading it for far too long).

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

Good morning/afternoon/evening/night, Ralph. (I think I covered all my time zone bases there). I have been thinking lot lately about all the rhetoric in the fandom about Harry’s health and well-being, and how loud it has felt this year. To be clear, I am not asking for you to weigh in with your own speculations about how Harry is doing, unless you feel comfortable doing so. (I’m not telling you what to do either way, obviously, seeing as I am only a little grey icon in your inbox and have no right or way to demand anything of you.) I’m more looking for guidance or even just your rambling thoughts about what is respectful and appropriate when we’re wondering about a celebrity’s well being, and how you handle your own thoughts and assumptions about this. I feel like over the course of the last year we’ve just been inundated with all this panic and speculation about how Harry is unhappy or unhealthy or otherwise not himself, going all the way back to the Jingle Bell Ball Golden performance. Every time we get any new content there’s a wave of people saying he looks too thin and overworked like he’s not getting enough food or rest, or overweight and out of shape (pick a lane, people), he looks stressed, he looks sad, he looks angry, his eyes have lost their sparkle, his smile is dim, he’s addicted to drugs, he’d addicted to drugs because Jeff is doping him up to keep him going, he’s going to quit music, he’s going to hurt himself, blah blah blah. And the people making these “observations” hide behind the assertion that they’re just worried for his health when they’re faced with any sort of criticism.

This whole ongoing rhetoric feels really…icky? I suppose? to me. I do kind of think he has looked more drawn and intense (“stressed” and “sad”) in the content we’ve gotten this year, but I also think (1) the content we’ve gotten has largely been pap shots and stunt stuff, (2) this year he had to postpone his tour, and we know he loves performing so that must have really sucked, and (3) this year has just been rather shit for all of us, we’re all stressed and sad and scared and frustrated by the larger political and social goings on, and by the ways our own lives are impacted. In the past, the content we’ve gotten where Harry looks the happiest and most at ease has been performance footage or him with his family and loved ones. We haven’t gotten any of that this year. It makes sense that the pictures we do get would feature him looking less than completely relaxed and jubilant. And then there are all the assumptions that he’s lost weight or gained weight and is therefore unhealthy or on drugs or drinking a lot and that just honestly pisses me off. You cannot tell jack shit about a person’s health from their weight, and especially not in random pictures taken at random intervals in random settings. To pretend you can is harmful, and Harry probably won’t see you making these assumptions about his mental and physical health based on the prominence of his cheekbones in a set of pap pics, but friends and strangers who are already struggling with their weight will. And the assertion that someone is dealing with an addiction of any kind (or, god forbid, and I hate even typing this, being subjected to drug use at the hands of someone with power over them) is an allegation that a) you can’t make from one picture and b) has really deep, life altering, tragic and painful and hard consequences for that person and all their loved ones, and deserves more respect and deference than to be treated as something you can just throw out into the great wild beyond and then forget about.

But beyond the fact that people are making hurtful and invasive allegations and assumptions about a real person’s private life based entirely on a very very limited and posed and edited set of content that was hand chosen to be given to us, I think the thing that bothers me the most is it feels like the people who are driving these conversations are doing so because they want something from Harry. It’s never (or rarely, I suppose) “man Harry looks tired in the pictures we’ve gotten lately, I really hope he’s taking care of himself, things have been so hard for us all.” It’s always “Harry has been so withdrawn and sad and angry he’s not communicative with fans and he’s not willing to engage with them when he sees them in public and I miss him. I miss my Harry. I miss happy Harry. I want him back. Give me Harry back.” Which tells me the concern isn’t Harry or Harry’s health, but rather the feeling that Harry owes us something that he hasn’t been giving, and now he must pay up or give us a valid excuse.

Then I do, occasionally though, find myself thinking “am I doing exactly what I’m complaining about? Am I assuming the worst of people based on a limited set of insights into their lives?” And in the wake of the Britney legal battle that has been unfolding recently, I sometimes wonder if maybe as fans we do have kind of a duty to call out celebrities when they seem to be struggling or acting incredibly out of character. Most of the time I follow this up immediately with the thought that I’m not responsible for anyone else’s health and safety, much less that of a 27 year old man I’ve never met and have no connection to beyond liking his music and his face, and I do truly believe that, but there is some part of me that feels uneasy just turning off all my concern, because I am a person who tends to be greatly concerned about everyone, who just wants everyone to be happy and healthy and safe and loved, and who wants to help people feel that way, where and when I can. So I guess what I’m asking, in the incredibly long winded and winding way I ask anyone anything (my poor husband, he gets a novel from me every time I ask what he thinks we should do for dinner) is do you have any of these same feelings and concerns? How do your navigate them? Where do you draw a line? Do you just withdraw completely from this type of speculation? How do you balance being a kind, engaged, empathetic fan with being a respectful, responsible fan who knows their limits? (And man, isn’t that the ultimate question?). Your blog is one I end up on whenever something big happens or a particular conversation pops up, because I’ve found that I really value the way you break things down and are willing to consider them from many perspectives, so I appreciate you even taking the time to read this.

Thanks for your interesting thoughts about Harry anon. I feel like there's a lot to respond to here and I'm going to start by answering the questions your questions - and then I'm going to get distracted and talk about a post I really hated.

I'm always a little bit worried about Harry, and all 1D members. He might be really struggling, that's always a possibility. Harry has lived a very intensely scheduled high workload life since he was 16. He might have had all sorts of responses to the fact that that schedule was removed, or anything else that is happening in his life. But I feel like I'm generally pretty boundaried about those concerns.

I think part of it is because my base line assumption is that boyband members are pretty fucked up. You don't need to know a lot about the history of touring musicians to know that. I think I've said before that if 1D members are eating every day and not doing needle drugs then they're doing better than we have any right to expect (and if they're not eating and are doing needle drugs, then those are coping mechanisms for intense stress and there's no shame in either of them).

I do think it helps with boundaries to be starting from a point that acknowledges how hard it is to be a popstar. I'm all about fantasies of omnipotence and in my day to day life I think I can fix all sorts of things, but I don't think I can make any difference to any 1D member's life.

In addition, I am profoundly affected by having been a fan throughout 2016. We know what it looks like when Louis was going through a horrendous, devastating, trauma - and it looks pretty normal.

None of this means I don't have opinions, or worries, but I am aware that my opinions or worries aren't facts. It's rare that I think that my worries should matter even to people reading my tumblr, let alone other fans in general, and certainly not Harry. You say 'am I doing the same thing as other people assuming the worst about people...', but I'd argue that that's actually not the problem. There's nothing wrong with assuming the worst of people. What is wrong is when fans think their assumptions about a celebrity should matter to anyone else. You don't have to turn off your concern to think that it's not a priority.

I definitely think it would be a very bad thing if people took the moral as the 'free Britney' movement as 'fans should call out celebrities when they think they're struggling'. That sort of surveillance isn't effective or useful. What has been useful for Britney is solidarity in a well documented power struggle, which is a very different thing.

And I can't emphasise enough how important the 'well documented' aspect of this is. What most fan worrying about Harry amounts to is: 'I don't like what he's doing, and there's no way he'd do things I didn't like and therefore there must be something wrong with him'. That's a really controlling way of thinking about people. I really think it's important not to reproduce that abusers logic.

I am pretty well insulated from that sort of discourse from a very well weeded dash. But I saw a post that was mostly about other fandom stuff, that treated assumptions like: "Harry must hate being with Olivia and he's suffering and it's clear he's not happy with his image and his team" as building blocks that you don't even have to argue for (this is the post - and I'm going to come back to one of the things someone said that was even worse in a second).

Lets stop for a minute and imagine that Harry hasn't got a problem pretending to date Olivia, and his main concerns are about the messiness of life and his career at this point in time. It is really fucked up and agressive, and pretty hateful towards Harry, to say 'oh he couldn't possibly want this. It's clear that he hates it.' etc. (I feel like I've been making this argument for years about people who object to Louis doing such things as smoking and not performing middle-class culture for them). When fans trash talk what Harry is doing at the moment, and suggest that believing he could be choosing what he's doing is some how an act of huge disrespect to him, there is every chance they are trash talking him and the choices he's making.

The final thing I want to draw attention to is how often this sort of fan storytelling is combined with a profound lack of interest in what 1D members are actually going through. The tags screen shotted and added on to the post I reblogged actually described Holivia as Douis 2.0. Apparently assuming that there was absolutely no connection between Douis, and Louis and his family's ultimately successful efforts to privacy as Jay was dying. What the fuck is wrong with people that they ignore that, and erase that? There's far more interest in making up 1D members suffering so that fans can continue to tell the stories they want to tell, than actual acknowledgement of what we know that they went through.

Sorry I got distracted. What I'm trying to say is that there's nothing wrong with having feelings about celebrities or telling stories about them. But it's so important to acknoweldge the limits of your knowledge and power, even when fandom discourse encourages the opposite.

[kindofwriter]

Hey there! My group of friends have been hardcore considering turning a passion project of ours into a real podcast, and I was wondering if you had any advice for newbies putting together a show. We’re a small, young team, but we have a lot of passion for our concept and some writing/sound experience under our belts. Do you have any tips regarding finding actors, the process of plotting, sensitivity readers, or anything else you’ve had experience with in your projects? Thanks for reading!

Ok, finally ready with this! Thank you so much for the question, I will try to share my ~wisdom~ in the following post, but feel free to ask any further questions!

How to start a podcast: 1. when you’re new and/or 2. when you have money!

1. It’s easier than you think! My first advice is to just go for it! Even if it doesn’t quite go as planned you’ll have fun, and it’ll give you great experience for whatever you want to work on next!

Casting:

I’m going to assume this is an unpaid project (hence the former part of this advice being for free podcasting!) but if that’s not the case please skip to section two!

When I can’t offer any form of payment for a project I like to use friends as a cast. Not because my friends deserve any less payment! But because I can pay them in free chips and credentials for their portfolios, and it makes me feel slightly less bad!

Ways to go about deciding which friends to cast: I was lucky enough to do a lot of theatre work in my first year of uni, so I already knew a lot of people who were interested in both acting and production work. You’ll probably come across several actors who think voice acting is beneath them, but who wants to be friends with those people? What I’m trying to say is: if you have friends who are interested in theatre they’ll probably be interested in this! Especially given the past year.

I also poached people from my DnD group, because I could already gauge their acting specialities from that, and I knew what kinds of things they were interested in based on which DnD campaigns they enjoyed best.

If you know anyone who is interested in public speaking, whatever you all those reading awards where you read aloud dramatically, or something like radio and TV presenting then they’ll probably also be interested and do a great job! The great thing about podcasts is that all you really need is someone with a good voice - they’re free to do whatever they like with the rest of their face as long as they’re reading the lines!

You can, of course, also put out a casting call. It’s very important that you make it clear that it would be unpaid work. Even if you plan to set up a kofi, patreon, or kickstarter (info in the money section!), if you don’t have the money to begin with you shouldn’t promise it to people.

There are up and downsides to both. Casting people you know means you’re more likely to be comfortable working with them, there’s less pressure to offer payment, and your cast are more likely to have free time specifically for this project. However, you won’t have the draw of casting known industry voices, and (like I found!) your cast may not have any social media engagement whatsoever!

If you put out a casting call you’re more likely to get a pool of diverse voices, it will likely be people invested (even if not plugged in) to the industry, and you can request that they have their own equipment! However, you then have to work with people you don’t know, a level of professionalism that isn’t usually present on first time projects may be expected, and unpaid casting calls are not wildly well received.

Personally, for your first show, I’d try to use as many friends, or even friends-of-friends as possible. That being said, if you want advice on putting together an audition pack let me know!

Plotting:

It depends on what kind of show you’re aiming to write, but in general plotting a podcast is kind of like plotting a TV show. First of all you should plot out what’s going to happen in a season. Then plot out what’s going to happen in each episode. Ideally each episode will have its own arc, but things don’t always work out like that.

I like to plan things out in a fair amount of detail beforehand (this is especially helpful if you’re writing collaboratively.) Start with what’s going to happen in each episode. Once I know that, I then like to write how it starts and finishes, then the content in bullet points. If you ever can’t think of anything then don’t worry! A lot of things really come together when you’re actually writing.

The most important thing is to not worry at all about the first draft. Just get it down, editing is much easier and more fun once you have something to work with!

There are definitely much more qualified people than me out there giving advice about writing and plotting though; even if it’s directed at prose and script writers it’s still more than applicable!

Sensitivity readers:

If you have the option of sensitivity readers they’re always a great idea! But asking someone to read your work (usually for free) is both time consuming and potentially risky if you don’t know and trust them.

Tumblr, the writeblr community specifically, is a good place to find a sensitivity reader. A lot of people want the practise and are willing to do it for free if you put a call out.

One of the best ways to get feedback on your work is to cast/find people who are appropriate for the roles and then ask for feedback. Obviously they don’t have to, but you’ll find that usually they want to. You can aid in this by giving them some way to give feedback anonymously - maybe a google form - as no matter how chill and friendly you are as the prod team you will always be seen as In Charge.

If you don’t feel right asking someone, especially from a marginalised group, to read and comment on your work for free, you can always just ask general questions in forums or on social media. This isn’t as reliable, as people can lie online, but if you find the right communities and explain you just want to portray characters as accurately as possible there will always be people willing to offer some help. Reddit, for all its flaws, builds great communities, though remember to check the rules to make sure people outside of whatever group they’re aiming to support are allowed to post.

Of course, the first step to writing anything outside of your own experience is a tonne of research. The sensitivity reader should be picking up on small things, not telling you the basics of their experiences. And everyone’s experiences are different, which makes this even tougher! You can get things so spot on for a handful of people whilst inadvertently offending others. Be prepared to be adaptable and take on criticism, but also remember that you don’t have to bend to everyone’s whim; one person saying ‘but this wasn’t my experience!!’ doesn’t mean you’ve done a bad job.

Equipment:

I know you didn’t ask, but this was what I found scariest when I was Brand New.

If you have the money and you’re very serious about this I haven’t encountered a single person who wouldn’t recommend a Blue Yeti mic. However when you’re just starting out, and especially if you’re not planning to have all of your cast together record together/separately but with the same mic, blowing over $100 on a mic is huge, scary, and not always feasible.

I have three small desk mics that I loan out to my cast when needed. They cost ~£30 ($40) from (ew, I know) Amazon. You don’t need a mic for each cast member - you don’t even need a mic for the max number of character speaking in a scene at once. You could probably do it all with one mic, but the time that would take and the affect it would have on scenes may be worth the extra cost! These obviously don’t produce the crisp quality a professional recording mic would, but they have a pop filter and a windscreen and seem to do a good job at reducing background static.

Further noise reduction: Mr Alexander Jalexander Newall, when starting his podcast empire half a decade ago, got it in one: blanket forts.

If you can build a little fabric den for your cast to record in: perfect! If not, tell them just to stick a duvet over their head. This increases the risk of moving duvet sounds, but reduces everything else! And if they shift under the blanket you can always ask them to get comfortable then read the lines again.

And, info courtesy of the McElroys: you can also record in a wardrobe or a room with plenty of bookshelves if you don’t want to build the world’s most bangin’ blanket fort.

The most important advice you will ever receive:

Don’t be scared to ask for help! Join Facebook groups and ask questions! Join discord servers! Message people on Twitter and ask for advice (certain ppl are much more amenable to this than others, but this is pretty clear from their Vibe)! Heck, you can message me on Twitter (or here. Or send another anon. And if I don’t know the answer I’ll ask someone who does!) Everyone just wants to help everyone else, and if they don’t they’re probably not the kind of people you want to associate with. Good luck! And let me know once you socials are up, so I can follow and get excited!

Now, onto 2. Money stuff!

A lot of the info stays the same, but money kind of raises the stakes. Once money’s involved, especially once money and people you don’t know so well are involved, suddenly you have to operate like a business.

Casting:

If you’re planning to pay actors proper wages from the get-go you probably want to put out a casting call. Paid work will attract professionals, and professionals will not only do a great job, but will also help you gain an audience (and have their own equipment!)

You get to decide what the hourly rate is, but usually, depending on where you’re from, there is an average hourly rate voice actors get paid, and if you’re nowhere close to that people will be put off.

You should also make clear what the hourly rate includes: whether it is just recorded audio hours, or includes table reads and directorial time. A lot of people just have every actor record their lines separately, sometimes without direction, then edit them all together. This certainly saves on cost, and makes for a quick turnaround, but it’s no fun, and sometimes makes the show kind of soulless.

Kickstarters:

You can run a kickstarter on an unpaid project, in the hopes of eventually paying the cast and maybe funding future seasons. But I’m going to assume this is advice for ‘I can pay the cast, but what is a kickstarter for?’

Well, that’s up to you! It can be for equipment, for better editing, for podcast music, for podcast art, for a pay rise for the team, for bonus content. Depending on how many stretch goals you have, it can be for all of these things!

In short: backers give money, and get things in return, for example $5 might get you a pin badge, while $100 might get you a signed poster. When the kickstarter reaches a certain goal, maybe $5,000, then the team may then have enough money to produce a holiday special, for example. At $10,000 everyone on the team may get a 10% pay rise.

This is a great way to get people invested in the show, and a great way to make money! But if you want a really great kickstarter you’ll probably want to hire someone with experience in this area.

Contracts:

Money means contracts! Usually two will suffice, they just need edited for each individual team member:

An NDA, to prevent people from discussing the show in any inappropriate situations.

And a literal workplace contract.

You’ll be able to search how to draft these online, but it’s useful to have the help of a lawyer. There are people who do this specifically for podcasts who’ll be able to help you out, but again: you have to pay them!

Equipment:

As I said, actors will probably have their own equipment, but if you want them all recording together: you can rent a studio! They’ll already have all the equipment for you, which is The Dream!

Or you can convert a room into your own studio! Get some soundproof panelling on the walls and invest in a good mixer. I’m afraid I don’t have much advice on this, as I cannot afford anything close to a good mixer! But there are plenty of articles online with helpful information.

I wouldn’t recommend making a paid podcast as your first project, as it’s a lot of pressure, and would almost definitely mean bringing new people onto even the production side of things. There’s always the option to work on another project first, something smaller-scale, to work out any roadblocks you may run into during the paid show. But I’m not telling anyone what to do: if you’re ready, go for it!

Anyway, this was very long and quite rambly, and is probably filled with things you don't actually need to know! But I hope at least some of it was useful! Please feel free to ask any other questions - now or in future, PM or anon - and again: best of luck! I'm so excited for you!

[rotationalsymmetry]

A word about Harry Potter.

One thing that’s standing out to me right now, because I’m thinking about prisons, is that the HP series has an entire book where the awfulness of prisons is the main theme. Sure, it’s a fictional prison and dementors aren’t real. But you’re clearly supposed to be thinking, at the end of Prisoner of Azkaban, “what if real world prisons are that bad?” and “wait, innocent people getting convinced is a thing that can actually happen, right, so maybe it’s important to make sure that we don’t treat anybody horribly no matter how bad the thing we think they did actually was?”

It’s not a clear “raze the prisons to the ground” stance, but it is a clear “there are some things you just don’t do to people, no not even really bad people” stance.

And that theme recurs throughout the series. There’s no moment when Harry and friends sit down and go “well, I know these curses are called unforgivable, but the enemy we’re up against is so powerful and horrible we have to start using Crucio and Imperio and Avada Kedavera.” I know a lot of people think this is corny, but JKR made a choice to have Harry win through the Power of Love and a disarming spell — Voldemort died from his own hate spell bouncing back at him, not because Harry decided he deserved to die, which is consistent with the “just because someone’s bad and dangerous doesn’t mean you can do anything you want to them” theme.

There’s some fantasy stories where good and evil are labels for sides, and the good guys don’t actually act any differently than the bad guys. Harry Potter is not one of them.

There’s people criticizing Harry Potter and that is right and good, it should be criticized.

There’s some people criticizing Harry Potter in a way that makes it sound like it’s just a horrible series with no redeeming qualities and certainly not something that anyone should read or engage with.

I don’t stand there. I have yet to encounter a story so thoroughly problematic and without positive qualities that I think no one should read it. There are books I won’t read and movies I won’t watch. (And a whole lot more that I’ll watch and then criticize the shit out of.) But that’s different.

There has to be room, a lot of room, in the middle: this book is good in this way, bad in this way, read it if you want, don’t read it if you don’t want. I’m tagging this so that anyone who’s absolutely done hearing about HP doesn’t have to.

Now, JKR as a public figure is a bit different: she’s been saying incredibly transphobic things and that requires pushback and damage control. But most of that can and should be in the forms of “these are ideas in society at large, how can we condemn and deplatform (I think deplatforming is better than refuting here) these violence-inciting statements in society at large” and “these are ideas in specific subcultures, how can we keep our subcultures from being hostile to trans women/trans people”* rather than “hey, if we act like Harry Potter doesn’t exist and that only bigots talk about Harry Potter, that will fix everything right?”

You can’t divide stories into good stories and bad stories. That’s not how it works.

There has to be a LOT of room for “this story has good qualities and bad qualities, let’s talk about them, and neither set cancels the other out.”

And this isn’t an unwillingness to do anything, OK? Some people are presenting this as not being willing to make even the smallest sacrifice. This is not about that.

You have no idea what a given person does for trans people in terms of money, volunteering for hotlines or youth shelters, just being a friend, taking care of a trans person’s cat while they’re recovering from surgery, signal boosting money requests, being a shoulder to cry on, escorting trans people through situations that could be dangerous to them, deflecting harassment, writing letters and making phone calls, answering Trans 101 questions for less aware relatives, giving less aware friends and relatives a chance to process their cisfeels so they won’t do that at a trans person, writing postcards or letters to trans people in prison, promoting works by trans people by word of mouth, offering a couch to crash on for a while, making sure events have appropriate bathroom options, pushing their workplace to be more trans friendly, and just every other thing that trans people need other than getting a break from hearing about that one terf author and the series that she wrote, which can be accomplished in much easier ways.

And yes, I don’t get to decide for trans women and other people who are directly affected by transmisogyny what an appropriate response to JKR/HP is. However, as far as I can tell, this “if you don’t stop engaging with the HP fandom entirely you’re prioritizing your own comfort over trans women’s safety” thing is not actually primarily coming from trans women etc and is not an opinion that most trans women etc hold.

I could be wrong.

(Do not use this post as an excuse to be awful to anyone, especially actual trans people, just disengage/block instead.)

*transmisogyny also affects many non-binary people, not sure how to say that succinctly (transfem people I guess?) and this stuff also hurts trans men and other trans people who aren’t transfem.)

[gg-astrology]

hello💗 can you please further expand about taegi dynamics it is so fascinating and you write so beautifully please if you can it would make me so happy🤧💕

OOF i’d love to make you happy! 💕 and I love them too :( 💕 I wrote about them in Tae’s Inner Planet Reading and then His Member Dynamic posts (and I have something else coming up for Tae that’s gonna be his loveable dynamic with everyone including his dog/strangers) But sure! It’s gonna be kinda brief though I hope that’s ok! 💕

[Below Cut: Taehyung - Yoongi Brief Dynamic ]

The thing about these two is that they’re both dumbos and I love them 

One of the things I love most about them is Taehyung’s Moon conjunct to Yoongi’s Venus (Aries) – the way Yoongi spits fire? The way he expresses himself? His rapping style? His teasing nature? That’s literally Taehyung’s Cup of Tae.

So much admiration coming from this aspect, especially it’s the luminary making aspects to someone else’s self-esteem/ego/the way they present themselves (Venus) . It’s in a close degree as well, around 0′30 (if we know the birthtime it could vary/change) 

But overall– Taehyung has a soft spot for Yoongi, especially when he shows himself off in public (which he rarely does)

Moon person is the one who feels touched, feel understood. With Aries in particular,  direct aspect like this feels like a shot straight to the heart. Once they’re in, they’re hooked line sinker. There’s no doubt in his mind that a person who could be so vivariously who they are, how they are. With all their faults and flaws and still coming out running (’step harder kid’ – literally all of Yoongi’s songs/verse honestly) could continue to be great inspiration to them.

On the other hand, having such strong intense support from the Moon (especially a fire moon) feels like heat rising up in the Venus person. The Venus is more impersonal than the luminary in a way– in this case, they can’t comprehend how much the Moon person likes them mostly because the Venus is just how they come across (take it or leave it). 

The Moon sinks deeper in the feeling, and when they express them outwards it’ll always catch the Venus person off guard. They’re just being themselves, they didn’t expect praises or understanding from others. Especially with Aries Venus– they’re often more receptive to criticism (come to expect them) or challenges rather than deep feeling of love/admiration for them (especially if it’s intensely emotional/heartfelt like Tae is in his Moon)

And Tae’s not shy about saying it outloud. This goes both ways you know. HIs Mercury is trine to Yoongi’s Moon [0′31] So in terms of self-expression? Letting Yoongi KNOW he’s there for him/gets him? Tae’s there.

On the other hand, because it’s now YOONGI’s luminary being trine to Taehyung’s Mercury– he has an instinctive/intuitive ability to speak what Taehyung’s thinking/speaking. He can guess it, but because its Capricorn-Virgo– Taehyung needs to open up/not suppress himself a bit more for Virgos to understand what they’re saying. 

Taehyung’s enthusiastic, but the part we don’t see as often is when he’s being serious. Taehyung’s Saturn is conjunct to Yoongi’s Sun and Mercury (Pisces - 0′53/0′26) The Saturn person usually brings to light the Sun/Mercury’s grievances. They’re challenges because the Saturn people has to overcome the same thing as the personal planet person. 

In both cases, they have similar dysfunction with their Pieces (especially Yoongi’s Pisces Mercury that makes him unable to express his emotions in a manner that’s straight-forward) 

Thus, prolonged activity together causes them to confront their emotional inadequacy. Both sides are capable of different things, but comes from the same whole sign (Pisces). They quarrel a lot, mostly because they’re similar yet exert the sign differently from each other.  

Taehyung exerts it through practice, through overcoming challenges. While Yoongi exerts it naturally, but because it’s so personal he can feel emotionally attacked (personally attacked) because of criticism. 

Pisces, in any case, is aversive/sensitive to being put on the spot and made to answer to hard-hitting confrontations. So in both cases, they may end up hurting each other (lashing out) without knowing why they got hurt (or asking why the other is hurting them -victimizing themselves)

Another thing that might be a surface level (noticeable) problem for them is Taehyung’s Moon square Yoongi’s Uranus/Neptune (Aries - Capricorn) — mostly it’s a power-struggle. An authority struggle between Capricorn and Aries. 

Although he has Capricorn himself (Taehyung), Yoongi in this case is both a representation of him (what he’s struggling to be accepted by) and also an authority figure in and of itself. Taehyung’s personal sense of self (emotionality/moon/subconscious/ego/person) feels threatened/questioned and challenged by Yoongi’s Uranus/Neptune. Combined with the Saturn/Uranus-Neptune from earlier it feels like on the surface level Yoongi is just doubting him or questioning who he is because he’s suspicious of him (doesn’t understand his character)

Yoongi on the other hand, is coming from a place that’s less personal this time. His Uranus/Neptune is trying to guide Taehyung’s Moon into making better decisions, he’s trying to engage with him in the same level he engages with Seokjin.

Note that Yoongi— notoriously bad at self-expression (Pisces Mercury/Aries Venus) and already kind of misunderstood for his reservation/helpful quality (Virgo/Pisces) – doesn’t come off straight-forward himself. 

So there’s bound to be some misunderstanding. Yoongi’s Virgo Moon likes to help, and he’s just trying to bring that about in an objective manner to Taehyung (Capricorn, want to connect to Tae’s Capricorn)

It’s just— a big whole mess because instead of being conjunct to Taehyung’s personal Capricorn placement he’s aspecting to Taehyung’s emotionality/sensitive nature (Moon) instead. 

It’s kind of really dramatic, crush on senpai and confessing scenario. Misunderstanding in between and running away crying. Senpai trying to be a better person for them. It’s a whole mess.

But it’s also— really nice, because underneath it all there are some good attractions between them (not romantically, just like– strong attraction)

Mars conjunct Uranus, Saturn conjunct Lilith, Venus trine Jupiter – there’s a lot of supplementary stuff that is just– helpful to each other.

Taehyung by nature is pretty self-sacrificial, maybe not in the Virgo/Pisces sense. But he’s willing to do a lot of things that isn’t at all beneficial to him in anyway just to help someone elses out (lends a hand to people, even when they didn’t ask, support/encourage them, take the extra mile/step to help them)

And Yoongi himself, has to learn how to accept help because he’s been giving himself away in the more martyr/sometimes potentially draining and toxic sense. Their ways of giving to other people differ. With Yoongi, he drains himself. With Taehyung, he gives what he can to others (through effort/will). 

So really, once Yoongi acknowledges/grow to appreciate it and learns how to actually receive affection from others for once. They’re going to have a much better time balancing each other out. 💕

That’s it for Taegi! 💕💕💕 I hope this was good for you to read ;u; 💕💕💕I had a lot of fun reading them, so I hope you get to enjoy it too 💕    

[docholligay]

Thanks for kind words behind the cut

sphinxfeathers replied to your post

“I’m a little nervy about the con/my life right now, so if anyone had...”

Your stories always make my day. Having been a fanfic reader and writer for many years, I’ve seen a lot of people come and go in the fandom and your writing is by far the most amazing and emotional. I hope someday that you write a book and I will be able to enjoy it.

Thank you so much, this is so kind

verbforverb replied to your post

“I’m a little nervy about the con/my life right now, so if anyone had...”

Your fiction always makes me smile. Your non-fiction always makes me think. Your eye for detail in both is incredible, and I find the way you describe the craft of writing incredibly interesting and useful as well. And writing aside, you're kind of an amazing role model and also hilarious, A+ would yell at about eurovision again.

Thank you so much and I swear if the UK ever wins eurovision (AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) I’m going to be there and we’ll figure out a way to go. 

@themiscyra1983 said: 

Your canons have supplanted actual Sailor Moon and Overwatch canons for me, and did so BEFORE J.K. Rowling finally drove me into full on ‘death of the author is a valid practice we should all as fans adopt like crazy’ mode, so that’s the regard I hold you in, and I’m sorry I can’t come to Toronto but I’m sure you’ll be awesome.

Thank you so much! I love so much, because I am vain, when people tell me I *am* Overwatch to them, and this is the first time I’ve ever heard it about sailor moon and I am THRIVING.

@skylineofspace said: 

I find your honesty and integrity incredibly admirable, and your advice and example has helped me a lot to be better and more satisfied in my own life. Have fun at the con, and be there very slightly nicer Michiru we all need.

ahaha, THANK YOU. THis was so sweet. 

rhiorhino

replied to your post

“I’m a little nervy about the con/my life right now, so if anyone had...”

Idk if like this is weird or cheesy or w/e but I really look up to you a lot, as like a writer and a person, and I've gotten a lot more confident pushing myself to talk about wlw and stuff just from saying "my friend doc and her wife jill" "my buddy, her wife is a vet and-" y'know, stuff like that. It's really helped me push myself to be more open, through you kind of? I really appreciate your frankness and willing to be open about hard truths and what's *needed*  Not just what's *wanted*  I’m like a super anxious and “shaky pink thing” in general but just being in chat with you and jet and everyone, y'all were immediately welcoming and funny and I really enjoyed myself tonight. It was super fun!!

No,this isn’t cheesy, this is LOVELY, thank you so much! And you were a delight!

@notesfromtheidiotbox 

I enjoy your writing and bought Overwatch partially because of them. I adore your fried chicken recipe. And I enjoy that you take no shit from anyone including yourself. You intimidate me, but I still like seeing your thoughts on things even if I haven’t heard or, or even have any interest in them. You are truly unique. The hard-drinkin’, straight-shootin’, fast-writin’, femme-as-hell-but-tough-as-nails, Lesbian Queen O’ the West. -The one, the only Doc Holligay! Yeehaw

THANK YOU SO MUCH also that part made me laugh so hard ahah. 

@sittingoverheredreaming   Your writing had honestly made me such a picky reader, you’re one of the only authors anywhere that has a style I’m super into (I love how artful you are and how much your phrasing and word choices make me think) AND content that I’m starving for. There’s so few works that make me feel the way your fics do. I’ve had maybe a handful of novels and short stories ever even come close. You’re amazing, as a writer and as a person.

I feel so weird about whether I’m a good writer or not, and this is so wonderful and affirming andlovely. Especially since I know you studied writing too! 

madegeeky

replied to your post

“I’m a little nervy about the con/my life right now, so if anyone had...”

You're one of the most talented writers and brilliant public speakers I've ever had the honor of interacting with. Listening to you speak about something your passionate about is mesmerizing in a way I've never experienced before. I could listen to you talk about the things you love for hours.

Thank you so much this was so kind!! 

I am also, and will forever be, angry that you made me love Tracer and her Winston so completely and utterly. Because that’s just how good your writing is: you dragged me kicking and screaming into a fandom I don’t even play the game for. And I’m so happy you did because I love Tracer and Winston and this world you built. But I’m also still angry. ;) 

AHAHAH YES YESSSSSSSS THIS IS MY LARGER GOAL IN LIFE (and her Winston, god do you know how to kill me)

Your writing is so beautiful and so glorious. I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but you have a way with images that’s breathtaking. Your fics are so amazing and intricate and beautiful that I don’t read them when I’m sick because I’m scared I’ll miss something and I don’t want to miss anything. I currently have a while backlog and I’m so very excited for when I can finally catch up.

Thank you so much and thank YOU for always leaving such amazing comments. 

You’re one of the bravest people I know. Sometimes, when I know I need to do something but it seem too big and too scary, knowing that you’d do it even if you felt the same way helps me get it done. I admire your gumption tremendously.

WELLNOW I HAVE TO BE BRAVE AND DO THIS DON’T I

@taperwolf  I like your writing: fiction, nonfiction, and scribbleage. You’re consistently interesting, entertaining when you want to be. I think of you when I think of good people.

Thank yoU!!

@paksenarrion-reader  you taught me a lot, and pushed me to seek out more knowledge. Thank you for that.

Thank you!!

@shavedjudomonkey  You’re a person I look up to. I don’t always share your opinions, but you’ve helped show me that that’s okay, and if I’m going to believe the things I do, I need to be willing to step up and defend them.You’ve also encouraged me as a writer. Thank you.

No, cause if you agree with me then you’re stll not doing your research and thinking about stuff! I totally WANT you to come to your own conclusions and disagree sometimes!! Thank you!

  @Mizunosakura You’re an amazing writer, whether it be non-fiction, fanfiction, or commentary, they’re all amazing to read and really engaging. You’re honestly a super interesting person and I always love all your posts even if I suck incredibly when it comes to commenting.

Thank you so much! 

@keyofjetwolf  Whoever bid on those Metallica cassette tapes hasn’t paid yet, and I’m pretty sure now they aren’t going to, which means I made less than ten bucks on about thirteen hours of feverish hard work. That comes out to about 77 cents an hour, but doesn’t factor in the fifty cassette tape shipping boxes that I bought in an act of both obscene optimism and critical overestimating.  In conclusion, I spent half a day peddling my garbage to no one and paid for the privilege, THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT

Everyone was very sweet but you took the prize for something that made me laugh no less than every single one of the three times I read it. 

[kai-skai]

I (probably) lost a friend recently

(whining about it beneath the cut, 1,596 words)

At the beginning of this month, I got into an argument about sexual abuse allegations against celebrities with him. The tone got pretty sharp by our standards, and eventually I got so upset I stopped responding. When we talked again the following day, neither of us mentioned the topic. I was relieved and happy to let it be.

Two days later, he sent me an email as part of an ongoing debate on various other topics. He had added a section on the sexual abuse discussion, arguing his point. I very much didn't want to get into that particular minefield again. I considered just responding to the rest and simply dropping the section, but he frequently criticized me whenever I didn't want to debate a particular topic, and I could already hear him doing so again even just thinking about it, so instead I hammered out a furious first draft, took some time to calm down, and then went back to clean it up later.

After brief consideration, I kept a paragraph emphasizing how much the debate upset me and about how I expected him to complain about that again as well as a few of the original all-caps words. It's a known factor that he's bad at picking up subtle cues regarding emotions; maybe some caps would get across how badly the topic was affecting me and cause him to reconsider and relent on his own.

For the next few days, he didn't message me as usual. I wasn't sure how to interpret his silence. Maybe he was pissed, maybe he was simply busy, maybe he had stuff to think through and work on. Without knowing details, I wasn't sure how to go about messaging him first, and feared that picking the wrong approach would lead to a fight. I didn't find the time and energy tor risk that outcome, so I waited.

In his next email, he expressed disappointment that I hadn't reached out to him in his days of absence. The fact that I'd just let all contact cease like that hurt him. (He had the reason wrong, thinking I was afraid to be annoying rather than just afraid of a fight.) I felt guilty about that for quite a while. (I'm not exactly good friend material.)

Then I read the rest of the email, which included the expected harsh criticism of my inability to debate some topics without becoming upset as well as that he could only hope I was as upset as him.

He referenced a mutual friend in his criticism who apparently agreed with him, so I spent the next few hours in a state of EVERYONE ACTUALLY HATES ME AND I AM HORRIBLE AND SHOULD NEVER SPEAK AGAIN, trying to troubleshoot the issue in question and failing miserably due to a lack of specifics and alternatives.

The last time I had the complaint in question raised against me was after I had expressed doubt about a statistic on what percentages of information in social interactions were verbal vs. non-verbal. The only alternative behavior I could think of that wasn't outright lying (which I very much do not want to do) was silence, but silence often gets me complaints as well, and falling silent on the sexual abuse debate had me earned the very complaint in the email. There didn't - and still doesn't - seem to be any way to improve my behavior. I considered just writing back "you are right about everything and I was wrong", but I was pretty damn sure that would not be received well either.

After an evening spent visualizing scenarios in which I walked on egg shells around friends even more than I do, responding in different ways to things I disagreed with, and still not getting it right, I got fed up with it, ruminated on the nature and value of friendship, and decided I just wouldn't have any friends any more and spend the rest of my life alone, which didn't seem too bad and was actually quite a relief compared to the egg shell scenarios.

Then I moved on to the statement about him hoping I was upset and reconsidered.

I may not have the most complete grasp on the nature and intricacies of friendship, but I've watched enough children's TV to know that friends are supposed to care about one another, to comfort each other and cheer each other up when one is upset, and to want good things for one another. Upsetting friends is generally bad. It is sometimes necessary and/or in their best interests, e.g. when their behavior is harmful to others or contradicts their own deeply-held values, but then it is a necessary evil, not a good thing. Friends may be willing to risk upsetting their friends if necessary, but they will try not to, and they definitely won't want to upset their friends. The people I admire and whose example I want to follow tend to be people who even go a step further and don't want to upset anyone, not even their (ideological or literal) enemies unless it is necessary.

And now my friend, whom I believed to share my basic values (happiness good, suffering bad), wanted to upset me?

Necessity did not apply: neither of us is in a position to make any kind of policies around sexual abuse or allegations thereof, neither of us is doing any significant activism regarding these issues, neither of us habitually leaves public comments on articles and whatnot loudly proclaiming our opinions, even the debate was private. Both of us agree that sexual abuse is bad and false allegations are bad, so we're also not in danger of (intentionally) doing any of that. There are virtually no consequences to our specific beliefs about sexual abuse allegations among celebrities. Our opinions on the matter are as close to existing in a void as opinions can be. If I completely changed my mind tomorrow, literally noone would even know unless they brought the matter up first.

Wanting to hold only true beliefs - something both of us (I think) value as well - also doesn't apply. Neither of us has empirical data for the level of detail we're arguing about. All likelihoods are likelihoods we basically pull out of our asses by anecdata, something that has been true in plenty of past discussions for many somewhat-important points. This is fine in mutually enjoyable theoretical debates that serve to sharpen minds and argumentative abilities, but neither of us was enjoying this debate. In fact, we were apparently both horribly upset about it.

It didn't make sense. There was some other value he was working off here, one unknown to me that I did not share and that was more important to him than basic principles of friendship.

Granted, we did not watch the same children's TV, and we never really made friendship principles clear, but he did express a desire not to hurt me, and to keep me safe and make me feel loved. So I think it's safe to assume we were on a similar page regarding what feelings we wanted our friends to have and what feelings we did not want them to have, and that he violated his stated parameters regarding our relationship. Or that I misunderstood them severely, or that they changed since then.

In any case, my model of him was wrong in some major aspect, and I could not and cannot trust it.

Thinking through and digesting all of that took me about four days. He messaged me on the third to ask whether I had received his email, and I didn't answer. He repeated his message on the fourth, and that time, I told him I wouldn't respond to the email, because apparently neither of us benefitted from it and the expected harm didn't seem justified. I was prepared to argue the point, clarify as needed and ask for clarification as the opportunity arose. He didn't reply, and we haven't spoken since.

Sometimes I see stuff I want to message him about, and then I don't. Sometimes I think about stuff we've debated and start working on my next reply in my head before I remember I won't send one. Then I miss him. I know I'll miss him less over time, that he'll fade from my head, just like my mom. Eventually I won't get the impulse to message him about anything anymore, or maybe just once a year or so.

Sometimes I think about reaching out, but he's probably pissed at me. Hell, he actively wanted to upset me even before. I have no reason to expect anything good. And if it results in a fight, disengaging again will be risky as fuck, and engaging further will be hell, and going through some hell might still not get me anywhere.

I should have replied to the rest of the email and just dropped the abuse stuff. Maybe I should just do that even now? I don't know if acting like nothing's wrong will be welcome or infuriating. (Fucking people, how do they work.) And even if we just picked up where we left off, I'd just get stuck having meltdown over emails again, only this time without even the expectation that he might not really want me to. Is that even worth it?

I wish I could have the nice things without the bad things, which is probably what everyone who has ever been my friend wishes about me. (It's what I wish about myself too, come to think of it.)

[peckhampeculiar]

This is not a drill

WORDS: EMMA FINAMORE; PHOTO: LIMA CHARLIE

From gaining the support of international music stars and getting meetings with cabinet ministers, to arrests and accusations of dangerous behaviour from members of the public, it’s fair to say Extinction Rebellion is making its mark.

Known as XR for short, the group describes itself as an international “non-violent civil disobedience activist movement”, which wants governments to declare a “climate and ecological emergency” and take immediate action to address the climate crisis.

In April the group “shut down” London for 10 whole days – blocking bridges and using peaceful, mass civil disobedience, resulting in more than 1,000 arrests.

In June, activists blocked traffic in New York, and chained themselves outside Angela Merkel’s chancellery in Berlin. In Paris, police used pepper spray to clear activists blocking a bridge over the Seine. In July, XR used brightly coloured boats to stop traffic in Cardiff, Glasgow, Bristol, Leeds and London.

All this activity has brought them a lot of attention, both negative and positive. When a hacker stole a cache of unreleased Radiohead recordings, instead of paying the demanded ransom, lead singer Thom Yorke released the music online and pledged all the proceeds to XR.

The group has gained meetings with people like Michael Gove – then secretary of state for the environment – but has also drawn criticism for blocking roads required for emergency services like ambulances, and in July more than 30 activists were charged with a range of public order offences in London. Planned drone activity over the summer – in response to proposals for a third runway at Heathrow – was cancelled after police warned those involved they could face life sentences and urged campaigners to reconsider.

Clare Farrell – one of XR’s founding members – is in it for the long haul though. Having been involved in activism since the early 2000s, the threat of arrest, for her, pales in comparison to the threat of climate change.

Having studied and worked in fashion, even setting up her own apparel brand in a Bussey Building studio, how did she come to this seemingly contrasting world?

In the early to mid 2000s Clare was part of the Space Hijackers, which she describes as a group of “anti-capitalist troublemakers”, parking tanks outside arms fairs and throwing parties on the Circle line. They were aligned with Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping – a radical performance group based in New York, focusing on mass consumerism – and other groups, with lots of focus on consumer culture and stemming people’s addiction to shopping.

So when Clare started working in fashion, she tried to do so sustainably. “I did a fashion degree and I wrote about the environment,” she says. “And everyone told me it was really boring and unimportant.” She wrote about how much water cotton needs to be manufactured, and what she says are “tens of thousands of people poisoned to death every year by the cotton industry”.

How did she square that anti-capitalist, anti mass consumerism, environmentally aware mindset with the fashion world? “Well, they [fashion and her activism concerns] kind of should be mutually exclusive, that’s why I’m not doing much with my brand – I’m a one-woman business so there’s a big deficit if you’re just not interested in selling stuff. I feel like I like developing a good product but I couldn’t give a sh*t about selling it.”

Clare talks about the difficulty of working consciously in fashion, saying big brands don’t follow through on promises while small brands suffer from a lack of scale, so she bounced between the two for a while before deciding that “green capitalism is absolute sh*te, people need to get a grip because everybody is going to die and it’s all been a joke. It’s not interesting to make organic T-shirts if you’re expecting an uninhabitable planet by the end of the century.”

Then in 2017 she met one of the other main founding members of XR, Roger Hallam – a PhD researcher at King’s College London who was on a hunger strike to demand the university stopped investing in fossil fuels and who had been testing out various civil disobedience tactics for years. He went two weeks without food, after which King’s agreed to divest from fossil fuels by 2022 and to be a fully carbon neutral institution by 2025.

Inspired, Clare went along to a meeting. “I went thinking, ‘Loads of people will be there because it’s really interesting’, but there were like, five people,” she laughs. She started blocking roads, testing out tactics like Roger had done, as part of a campaign called Stop Killing Londoners, calling for radical action on air pollution.

“Londoners breathe illegal air,” she says. “They have done for about a decade. It’s obscene, I have total disgust for the way public health and the environment is viewed by politicians and the way it doesn’t meet. There are 9,500 deaths in this city every year linked to air pollution. And that’s not part of the climate conversation.”

What she says definitely seems to be backed up by research. In June, Public Health England reported that the rate of fatalities linked to breathing in killer particles rose from 6.4 per cent to 6.5 per cent in 2017. That followed a jump from 5.6 per cent to 6.4 per cent the previous year, suggesting that efforts to clean up particulate pollution are having little impact. Before that the death rate had been falling since 2010.

Clare says angrily: “If someone drives a car into someone on a pavement outside the Houses of Parliament, how many thousands of pounds are spent erecting a barrier overnight and keeping it there, and debating rerouting roads and changing the traffic system? And yet for the sake of nearly 10,000 deaths a year they won’t put any effort in at all?

“Politicians say the public just accept those deaths as inevitable, as part of ‘progress’. I don’t think they f***ing do! People just feel like they can’t do anything about it.”

Hoping to draw attention to their cause, Stop Killing Londoners organised a series of what Clare describes as “little experiments”, testing how long it was possible to block a road before being arrested.

Then members of the group began pushing their civil disobedience further, getting sentenced for spraying chalk spray on City Hall, for example – then breaking bail and going back to do it again and again – or going on hunger strikes in prison and writing to Sadiq Khan from inside.

“In some ways it’s really not cool to say, ‘Get arrested and that’ll fix it’, because it won’t fix it, at least on its own,” acknowledges Clare. “But when you say, ‘There’s no way I’m willing to stand by and watch you do this without doing anything, and you can chuck me in jail if you want’, it shows your commitment, and it gets you the sympathy of other people, who realise the seriousness of the situation and that we’re willing to make a very serious sacrifice for it.”

Clare says non-violent struggles are about winning hearts and minds, winning the intellectual and emotional argument. “You can’t beat the state on the ground,” she explains. “If they send the army in, what are you going to do? You won’t win a fight that way. And what we’ve already done is to be able to shift the language, that’s a battle in itself.”

For XR, the term “climate change” is problematic, only helpful to states and big business. “If you term it like that it sounds somehow less alarming, like ‘Maybe we didn’t do it ourselves’. And that’s been very clearly steered while the public have been confused and all the fake science and bullsh*t campaigns and the PR and the billions that the fossil fuel industry has spent on PR – all of that, swinging the language round.”

But now “climate emergency” is entering the public vernacular, which for activists is a far more fitting term. It’s no coincidence that this shift has taken place since the establishment of XR in May 2018, after activist network Rising Up committed to working together on environmental issues and ran a series of talks across the UK signing people up to support them in taking action.

The light touch civil disobedience tested out by people like Clare and Roger Hallam – such as spraying something on a wall then sitting next to it waiting to be arrested – is the bedrock of their work. But to make an impact, it’s needed en masse. How have XR persuaded so many people to stand with them in acts like this? For Clare, it’s all about the national talks the group ran.

“If you’re going to ask someone to go and break the law with you, you’re not going to get them to say that on Facebook. You have to talk to them and they have to feel that they trust you and that it’s going to be worth doing. In the world of activism and organising, people overstate the importance of online. It doesn’t help you get proper support, people who are going to put their body on the line. That involves real time and real connection.”

Clare’s well aware that this isn’t something everyone can commit to, regardless of how concerned they are about the environment. “It’s not possible for everybody to engage in that act,” she says. “There’s always been a conversation among the Rising Up community about recognising privilege, but also about using it.

“A lot of criticism we’ve received says, ‘Well not everyone can go and get arrested’, because it’s more difficult for them, or because they’ll be treated really brutally because they’re not white, or who can take time off work, or who can have a bad DBS check. And it’s all true, it’s not fair. But it’s not fair right now, and it’s going to get a lot less fair really quickly. The people who can’t afford to take the time off work are going to have to face a doubling in food pricing in about 10 years.”

She says that if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford to make sacrifices, then you should consider it, and that the group acknowledges that there’s work to be done to help those who feel excluded by their brand of action.

“There are people like carers at home who were saying, ‘I can’t come out on the streets, how can I be part of this?’ People from communities of colour who said, ‘We think it’s too dangerous for us to do this but how can we be a part of it?’ We need to get our heads together in the coming months to think more and more about how that looks because lots of people want to recognise themselves as in rebellion but are not able to do some of the things that we’ve been doing.”

Clare also talks about working to persuade industries and sectors like culture, teaching, music and construction to declare an emergency.

“Concrete is also killing you,” she says. “It’s got a huge carbon footprint and doesn’t stop, and it never disappears. Massive carbon emissions from the concrete industry hardly ever get scrutinised, but it’s really, really not good. And its use just goes up and up.” Six XR activists were arrested in July after chaining themselves to the entrances of a concrete factory in east London.

Despite the huge task ahead of XR, Clare also says it’s a magical feeling to be part of building something so big that it takes on a life of its own. “You think, ‘There used to be 10 of us on Marylebone Road feeling no one’s paying us any attention.’”

Well, they are now.

[rumbleroarftw]

Newcomer Campaign

        I deleted the Tumblr app off my phone because it was too addictive. Tumblr is defined as a microblogging and social networking website by Wikipedia. There was nothing physically keeping me so obsessed on Tumblr all day and night, it was the memes, the Woke posts and the occasional artsy and thoughtful posts. This was only based on what I was following. I wanted to be this Tumblr girl who took blog-worthy pictures and wrote deep, meaningful stuff. I, of course, was not. I wanted to be a blog that was funny, aware and aesthetically appealing. In this process, I never fact checked anything before reblogging it and rarely followed original content creators. Because on Tumblr, you are likely to see content that someone reblogged from someone who reblogged from someone else and so on and so forth. I chose to study Tumblr for my Newcomer Campaign because I was a newcomer that quickly became an avid user and experienced everything first hand.

          During my time with Tumblr, I realized it was extremely slow. Part of the reason I committed Tumblr infocide was because it was infuriating how slowly scrolling through it was and because of my obsession, I was also impatient. It was bothered me that I was so affected by it, so I decided it was better to take a break. I propose a campaign that will solve the issues and help socialize and retain newcomers in the online community. I will use Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick’s book, Building Successful Online Communities (BSOC) as the main basis of my arguments along with other outside sources. I am arguing that Tumblr’s problems can be solved by the platform itself, without interfering with the user’s free speech that makes the platform so attractive. I will begin with brief descriptions of the two issues followed by my methods to improve on them. I will then reflect and conclude based on the discussion.

Reliable sources: Social Justice Warriors

          Tumblr is a great place to share any type of content including, but not limited to, photos, videos, gifs, articles, links, writings, and is a generally welcoming community. A user can easily learn the ropes without training or initiation. However, it is a common criticism of Tumblr that ‘Social Justice Warriors’ often make the community an unsafe place for writers. Social Justice Warriors (SJW) is a term now used for people who tend to aggressively impose socially progressive views. 

“The online presence of social justice blogging on Tumblr is extensive, spanning over a wide range of issue topics from religion, racism and gender equality to ablism, homosexuality and classism among many others.” (Knowyourmeme)

On Tumblr, such accounts tend to ignore the education aspect of social issues and immediately engage in attacking others instead. It is also common to see a SJW account reblogging and/or commenting on a post that is not verified as legitimate news. 

“The REAL problem with social justice warriors is their superficial mentality. There are many issues that are heavily affecting many people across the world but these individuals detract from many of the real problems but continuing to address and argue about meaningless topics in order to boost themselves in the eyes of their peers.” (Urban Dictionary)

          I have reblogged things in the past that I did not bother fact checking, which may have lead to false, misunderstood or biased information to be consumed by my many followers. I realized later that incorrect and incomplete information could be just as dangerous as no information.

          I think a good way to battle these warriors would be a built in fact checking mechanism or an outsourced embedding into posts so that the information shared on Tumblr is more complete than deficient. Some options of fact checking servers are listed below. Someone who is new to Tumblr may not be aware of this problem. If the newbie decides to write about a subject, they may not receive positive feedback. BSOC (p. 217) claims 

“When old-timers provide newcomers formal mentorship, the newcomers become more committed to the community, learn to behave in it, and contribute more.” 

Since Tumblr is not a particularly hard platform to get used to, formal mentorship is not necessary, but if Tumblr provided the fact checking servers, it would act as an official mentorship in the right use of sharing information.

          An alternative would be the function of verifiability of posts – certain admins could be in charge of this; a post can be shared at any point, but after an admin has fact checked it, it will display a logo like verified accounts on Twitter or Instagram so that readers know that to be real news.

Since there are a lot of things posted daily, users committed to the community could help with this if they received some admin responsibilities and similar to Wikipedia, these users could be thanked and appreciated. Expressions of gratitude can drastically escalate the recipient's pro-social comportment (Matias, 2014). These options are not rude and do not delete shared content, keeping the original share out there; therefore still maintaining free speech and not imposing rules and regulations.

Loading rate: Why is Tumblr so slow?

           If you start typing, “Why is Tumblr…” on Google, you will find the first suggestion to be “… so slow.”

Tumblr is infamous for its “stability issues” that result in mass hysteria (hyperbolically). I had a friend call me at 2AM one night two years ago asking me if my Tumblr was down too – and it was. So why IS Tumblr so slow and how can that be solved, if at all? As someone with little to no knowledge about servers and the Tumblr server specifically, I cannot possibly come up with the best solution. Since the platform requires you to use their server for your blogs, if Tumblr is inaccessible, so is your blog. The way that I tackled this issue for my assignment was to think of it like a businessperson. When dealing with newcomers, recruitment, selection, retention, socialization and protection are the five basic problems that need to be solved, according to BSOC. My solution to the speed problem has to do with retention of Tumblr users. 

“The community should engage in tactics to keep valuable newcomers until they can develop more robust ties to the community (Kraut & Resnick, p. 180).” 

The best way to go about this, in my opinion, would be raising money for Tumblr so it could expand or improve the quality/amount of servers so the users would have a more pleasant experience. I know that I would be one of millions to be willing to donate up to $5 for that cause. Wikipedia pages often display the fundraising bar; Tumblr could do a similar display for users logging in. Tumblr could also allow more advertising, even if it may give rise to some backlash.        

           The donation is something that maintains the users’ power, giving them a minute stake in the workings of Tumblr. In this way, their integrity with free speech is not violated and the content on their feed is not covered in unwanted (advertising) content.

Reflection

           I think my concerns about Tumblr are authentic and widely agreed upon, so they should have solutions to them sooner than later. My solutions for fact checking may be hard to execute, but I think it is vital to deal with. People do not want to be consuming wrong/incomplete/biased information and a big platform like Tumblr should not be allowing it. Since this platform is easy to use for anyone with access to the Internet, it holds some responsibility to its users. Out of the solutions presented above, I think the fact checking mechanism would be the best option because it requires less effort from the people, making it easier for the site to incorporate without too much backlash. However, this may extend the “too slow” problem. To solve which, the donation solution is the best way to go. If advertising is increased, it will allow for excessive sell out accusations, which could be a Public Relations nightmare and may encourage infocide in protest of the act.

Conclusion

           Based on my experiences and research, Tumblr is a fun and easy platform to use but has its fair share of cultural and technology-based issues. Speed and SJW are issues that can be tackled with without exercising official regulations that make users feel unsettled. While my solutions are all in keeping of free speech, they are also keeping the sanctity of sharing truthful information.

Fact Checking Websites:

·      http://www.factcheck.org/

·      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/

·      http://www.snopes.com/category/facts/

·      http://www.hoax-slayer.com/

·      https://www.opensecrets.org/

·      http://www.politifact.com/

References (not linked above)

http://reagle.org/joseph/2012/05/draft-infocide.html

http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/how-to-use-tumblr/

https://www.flightpath.com/blog/2016/10/tumblr-for-brands-pros-and-cons-of-tumblr-blogging-platform/

https://www.dailydot.com/society/tumblr-social-justice-laci-green/

http://freebeacon.com/blog/sjw-tumblr-probably-did-not-care-for-my-pro-empire-piece/

http://sjwhypocrisy.tumblr.com/

http://akatokuro.tumblr.com/post/21628341732/the-real-issue-with-tumblr-social-justice-culture

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Tumblr-so-slow

[jenroses]

storytelling and writing

aka: why I don’t always stop reading fic that’s spelled badly, uses poor grammar or has a less-than-fluent presentation

So, I think people get these things confused a lot. Storytelling comes in many flavors and forms, and some of the best storytellers who ever lived were completely illiterate. The oral tradition was created before writing existed. We’ve been telling each other stories probably as long as we’ve been using spoken language. Longer, maybe. Bees tell stories. Many of the best stories are told in the vernacular, their rough linguistic edges making them that much more relevant.

Writing is something else. Good writing has a lot of moving parts. From a functionalist perspective, writing is good if it conveys a story well, in ways that are evocative to the reader, without slip-ups that make the reader have to stop and try to figure out meaning. I’ve seen extremely well written stories that were done entirely in text-chat format, but they worked because they echoed the format so closely that the grammar being “wrong” (for formal written English) didn’t matter. The grammar was consistent for text chat. 

From a reader’s comfort perspective, things like punctuation, grammar, spelling and fluidity are important mainly because the more skillfully those things are used, the more transparent the writing becomes, letting the story, and the storytelling, shine through.

Complex language for the sake of complex language is nearly as problematic as incorrectly used homophones. Or, in simpler terms, when you use words people have to go look up, it trips them up even more than someone using the wrong they’re/there/their/der/dare.

I’m much more likely to stop reading a story if the story is not to my liking than if the language doesn’t flow. But language that doesn’t flow makes it a lot harder for me to see the story and know if I like it for its own sake. 

I’ve heard people say that storytelling is a gift and writing is learned, but in reality, gifts are possible in either area and proficiency in both can be trained. For some people, writing well comes from reading voraciously and paying attention to the “rules” of the game. Others work harder at it, and have to lean more heavily on editors. Some people have a knack for storytelling, but like all things, it can be improved through practice and observation. 

There are ways of getting better, faster.

Ask for help, pay attention to the help offered, and work to understand the rules behind the mistakes you make the most often. 

Use Google Docs collaboration tools, let your editors suggest, ask questions when you don’t understand why a suggestion is being made.

Read and listen to stories being told. Pay attention to what you like and what you don’t. Try to figure out why you like it, or what doesn’t work for you. Think about HOW the story works. I’m 45 years old and about a year ago an artist blew my goddamn mind by turning storytelling tropes on their head and saying, “nope” and everything I’ve written since then has been better than everything I wrote before.

Re-read your stuff with a critical eye and with your voice. Say things out loud to see if they make sense. 

If you’re writing in a language or dialect not your own, if you can, run it by a native speaker first, preferably someone from the area the story is set in or the area most of your readers are from. Even for English speakers in the US, if you’re writing British characters or shows, it is probably worth having someone British eyeball what you’re reading before you post it. (We call it Britpicking). Or be prepared for people to say, “Yeah, but...” if you’re lucky, and just sigh and move on if you’re not. 

Read aloud for pacing. If you have a little break or pause, there’s probably supposed to be a comma there. Don’t read pauses you haven’t written in, and it will become very obvious where the commas need to be. (And no one is perfect with them. I get missing or misplaced commas flagged in every fic I write because I have too many systems swimming around in my head.)

If you don’t know the rules or are guessing at spelling, look it up. Just type the word in your browser and look it up. You can get grammar rules, too. Don’t know if it’s peak, peek or pique? Peer or pier? Phase, faze, fey’s or Fay’s?  Look up all the spellings you can remember and get the definition. Google’s pretty smart about misspellings, too.  Fast paced or fast paste can be significant. If it doesn’t make sense to me as a reader, I read it aloud, but if I have to read it twice, the story is obscured. I still have to look up pore/poor/pour every once in a while. Wonder if the comma goes inside or outside the quotation marks? (Hint: It’s different in Britain and the US and I’m American and the US way is just wrong and my poor editor fixes it for me often.)

But the best way to get better? Keep writing. Keep storytelling. Keep doing it. Keep rereading your own stuff and improving it.  Keep making your shitty pots, and eventually they won’t be shitty.

Anne McCaffrey was an amazing storyteller. Kind of a mediocre writer in places, which may be a function of editing (or not editing... some pros get less edited as time goes on, which is often a shame.) But her writing was mostly transparent enough that her stories shone through, especially when I was 10 and desperately wanted to be far from everything having to do with real life, which sucked. 

Jean Auel was an amazing storyteller at one point. Then they stopped editing her, but her writing was not fantastic in and of itself. She did a ton of research, and it showed, and her storytelling was engaging enough, especially in her earlier books, but  her quality decreased greatly over time. I don’t want to be that sort of writer.

Lois McMaster Bujold is an amazing storyteller and one of the best writers I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. I’ve read probably 90% of what she’s written, and she started out high and it’s really hard to measure improvement when you start out that good. 

Tamora Pierce’s works have steadily improved over the years. This is GOOD. The farther into her works you get, the more interesting and beautifully written they get. When I’ve gone back to her earliest stuff on a series reread, I’ve been thrown by the quality difference, and when I tell people to read her, I give a caveat, that every book will be better than the last, but this is not a smooth line, but a more of a steep upward slope that flattens out over time but keeps climbing slowly.  The improvement is most dramatic in her first 4-8 books, IIRC.

If you look for ways to improve, you probably will.

If you don’t look for ways to improve, you probably won’t.

If your story is engaging enough, I’m willing to overlook a whole lot. 

Even the best writers have typos, spelling errors, homophone substitutions, misplaced punctuation and the occasional howler. (I once misspelled “proofreader” as “proofreeder,” and said proofreader did not catch it before publication. It was in the masthead of a magazine. Next to her name.)

Anymore, I send a link to stories I’m writing to 4-5 people who know my writing and/or the fandom in question and let them read in Google Docs before I go public. This might slow down updates, but it vastly improves the end result. I never regret doing this. Some just read and cheerlead, some question plot points and several will pick apart the grammar, etc. 

And even so, literally every time I reread my stuff I make minor changes. A comma here, a word there.