#we are a reasonably predictable community here on tumblr dot com

[techtomorrowland]

A Hello

First off, I had war flashbacks during the entire creation process of this account. Tumblr is a nebulous corner of the internet, one that I wanted to leave behind with every other mortifying thing I did as a teenager.

Yet here we are.

This time there will be no fandom-posting or anon ask games. No, I’m an adult doing serious work now here on tumblr dot com.

This blog, made specifically for a communications course on the future of media, exists in irony. I know my professor knows what he’s doing when he makes “create and maintain a tumblr blog for the semester” an assignment. I believe he thinks this is funny. I also agree with him if he does.

Enough. My name is Sarah, I’m 23, and I am a Master’s student in the Newhouse School at Syracuse University (newhouse.syr.edu, for those inclined). There are precautionary tales warning people of plainly sharing the information I just gave on the internet. It seems everyone is scared of what might happen online, the dangers of internet’s many unknowns. My most formative years have been spent online. I’m not scared of the people on the internet. I’m scared of the corporations that increasingly gain more control of our habits and information, and then exploiting us for a profit. It’s not a complete unknown. Corporations show us jargon-filled warnings openly saying that they’ll be tracking our online moves and using that data for their own reasons. This is a completely different can of worms.

No professor wants to hear that a student is taking their class to fulfill some sort of degree requirement set by the university. My professor (hello specifically to you, Sean, if you’re reading this) is lucky. I’m not taking this class to fulfill a degree requirement. I’m in this class because the school would not let me take the online social media night class that I wanted to take.  I love media, I think it’s fascinating, I want to see what happens next. Hearing stories about the early days of the internet is so exciting for me. Technology is so vast and manifests itself in an incredible number of ways, to the point that it is almost unimaginable to me what is in store for the future of tech. I’m hoping this class helps me to actualize where we’re heading in the fields of media and technology. I hope that it gives me a foundation that allows me to stay well-involved in these fields as they progress. And, as always, I’m hoping for some new networking opportunities.

I’m from Tennessee, I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where I majored in journalism and electronic media and minored in Arab studies. For awhile I was certain I wanted to go into international journalism and report abroad or on foreign news. I even studied abroad in the Czech Republic and took a course specifically on how to be a foreign correspondent. I connected with journalists at the Reuters bureau in Prague, as well as journalists from the BBC, CNN, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Back in the states, I was a producer, writer, editor, etc for several campus television shows. It was fun and our equipment was so out of date. I put lower-thirds in our shows in real-time using a Chyron machine. Spending any time in the digital news center studio at Newhouse is streets ahead of what we had at UTK, and what most real newsrooms have. In the spring of 2020, I interned for Knoxville’s number one television station, WBIR Channel 10 News. It was a blast. And then the pandemic happened, which shifted my internship into a completely remote workflow. I went from jumping in station cars with reporters to check out a quarry blast to sitting in my parent’s house and writing the latest COVID-19 updates. I then graduated college via a slideshow set up on my laptop in my parent’s living room. It’s definitely a period of time that won’t be forgotten. Not long after graduation, I made the decision to move 800 miles away, in the middle of a pandemic, to start grad school. This was not a “oh no this global disaster has made it so that I don’t know what I want to do with my life,” situation. I had known since my first day of undergrad that I wanted to go to graduate school. I had done campus tours and gotten into every grad program I applied to, albeit moments before the pandemic’s onset. Going to grad school was part of my plans, whether a virus was around or not. I’m someone who sets longterm goals and works hard to stick to them. That’s why I’m here now. 

Throughout all of that, content creation was at the back of my mind. I love to edit video and create graphic designs and curate a social media presence. Because of those passions, my musician friends have designated me as their brand manager and let me handle their social media, promotions, and shows. I want to focus on social media and how it’s changing. I think it has a lot of power, but I also think that there are more advanced forms of social media coming. 

This is much longer than what was assigned, but I do like to talk. I’m looking forward to learning and predicting parts of the media future.

[wumblr]

sabine hossenfelder released a video on her criticisms of ligo a few weeks ago (and i only saw it yesterday for some reason). she’s pretty emphatic about her belief that the gravitational wave detections are real, but

the scientific community is doing “a crappy job” of explaining their results. i agree! it’s why i put in the effort to learn the necessary language to start posting about this (sorry scientific community)

the glitch categorization. she says it’s bad practice to throw out a bunch of loud data to focus on the quiet data you’re interested in, and the names are silly. if this was the only problem it wouldn’t be so bad, but combination with #5 makes it worse

fitting the prediction to the data. how were the chirps found? what was the analysis method? we don’t know. they won’t comment

ruling out terrestrial sources (as previously reported when i covered thaddeus gutierrez -- that’s not still in my drafts, is it?)

we don’t have confident confirmation of any of the o3 neutron star events from optical telescopes 

the example she uses to explain #2 & #5 together is: think of an animal. is it an elephant? no? that’s a glitch in the data and can be ruled out. 

i’m not convinced this is a salient criticism. maybe if they were really throwing out the glitches before the data was ever stored in the first place (like cern does for over 90% of their particle collisions). also, i’m pretty sure i’ve seen a couple papers where somebody looked for mundane correlations in the glitch data, like candidate terrestrial sources. (here’s one... maybe this is what i was thinking of, where they looked for early gw detections in data from 2006 from a known pulsar glitch, which is a different kind of glitch regarding unpredictable spin velocity changes) 

my other concern is like, how do we know they’re neutron stars? isn’t this all based on chirp mass? what if they’re just unexpectedly small black holes? anton petrov just did a great video about black hole accretion disks as analogous to protoplanetary formation disks, meaning there are stars and black holes being created and colliding with each other as they inspiral. with how little we know about galactic nuclei and the black hole population, it wouldn’t surprise me to find we had overestimated the minimum possible size for black holes

how far outside the realm of possibility would be to detect 10 very distant neutron star merger events before we detect another one close enough to photograph? what are the distance estimates for o3 ns events? if memory serves, the nobel prize kilonova was about 40 something away, either lightyears or megaparsecs (so relatively nearby). is there something preventing optical observations? if these events are occurring in the accretion disk, would they be obscured by it? do we need to detect a merger out in a galactic arm in order to be able to see it? where was the nobel prize kilonova located, a nucleus or an arm? 

anyway it’s not my job to respond to ligo criticisms but these are pretty good ones, and if it was my job, throwing a bunch of unfocused “what ifs” at the criticisms would not be very good practice either, but this is tumblr dot com, where i post on my blog about gravity

[iloveabunchofmovies]

Whoops, I Fell Behind

I think these are all the movies I've watched since the last update.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

I guess I didn't like T2 very much the first time I saw it. It must have been a matter of miscalibrated expectations, because I thought it was pretty fun this time. It's a dumb, cheesy, feel-good family movie about a boy and his robot, and it also has exceptionally well-made action sequences and lots of swears.

Gulliver's Travels

The 2010 Gulliver's Travels, that is, starring Jack Black. It's so weird.

It is so weird.

It starts weird, and then it gets weirder. After about 15 minutes, I came up with a theory that they'd just spliced cut footage of Jack Black from other movies together and tried to Forrest Gump other actors on top of it, but no, every performance from the whole star-studded cast is bizarre. Every scene feels like it was shot by a different director, none of whom had ever communicated with each other.

Things just happen because they are the kinds of things that happen in movies. Imagine a waiter bringing you a head of cabbage, a t-bone steak, several noodles, one egg (cracked), and a sealed bag of gummi worms served in a scalding hot bowl of Sprite with flour. We would all agree that that is a meal, right? You can't tell me that these are not authentic Hollywood meal ingredients.

I'm not going to get any more specific than that. See this movie for yourself. See most of Jack Black's butt for yourself.

(I can't explain why I liked it, but I honestly did.)

Our Idiot Brother

I gave Our Idiot Brother a shot because the cast is great. What I can't understand is why the cast is great. The script is absolutely pedestrian. I successfully predicted the entire plot and every character arc within minutes of each character's introduction, so the dramatic elements don't really work, and nobody is written to be very funny. I can't recommend this movie to anyone, but good on the funny and likeable ensemble for taking something that might have been painful to endure and making it perfectly watchable.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash

Pluto Nash has a reputation. It's one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time, and the critical reception would have you believe that's with good reason.

I was expecting a disaster.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash isn't a disaster. It's a high-concept comedy without any jokes or fresh ideas. It's an adventure without excitement. I found it oddly likeable, though, and I was never bored.

It does have problems. I'm not a big fan of the way women are treated, for instance. The robots are more human than the women, and the women robots are just there to let you peek below their dresses. Oof.

But it's not much more egregious than what you'd see in other comedies of the time. That's not an excuse; I'm just saying casual misogyny doesn't explain the reputation.

Actually, despite coming out in 2002, Pluto Nash has serious '90s vibes. The needlessly detailed moon city sets remind me of Total Recall's Mars and Super Mario Bros.: The Movie's Dinohattan. I don't know why anybody approved a $100 million budget for a movie that still didn't have a coherent script after nearly 20 years in development, but I got Dinohattan-esque moon city out of it, and I am not complaining.

I expected something either unbearable or laughable, but Pluto Nash is actually pretty harmless and even a bit likeable. I don't recommend it, but I will now bristle just a little every time I hear it invoked as a punchline.

- - -

I’m ranking every movie I watch between my 33rd and 34th birthdays right here on Tumblr dot com because I am some kind of idiot person, I guess.

Spider-Man

Moonrise Kingdom

Fatty Drives the Bus

50 First Dates

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Alien

Gulliver's Travels

I Feel Pretty

TMNT

The Darjeeling Limited

The Orange Years: The Nickelodeon Story

Legally Blonde

Stargate

The Mitchells vs. the Machines

The Adventures of Pluto Nash

Our Idiot Brother

Brewster’s Millions

Pork Pie

Incredibles 2

Election

My Fair Lady

Thunder Force

[bambamramfan]

Part 3: Telling You What to Feel

The last part of replying to @jadagul here.

And this brings us to what I’m actually trying to accomplish when I get into these conversations. You write:

I believe that most people writing thousands of words about politics on tumblr dot com are actually deeply unhappy, and their attempt to change the political Discourse is reflective of a belief that things are not working and a compulsion to try to fix them.

I’m coming at this from a slightly different position: I am happy. But I have friends, and some of them are unhappy. (And in general I like most people, and we certainly agree that there are unhappy people out there somewhere). So my “project”, to be a bit grandiose about it, is to try to help other people be as happy as I am.

But there are (at least) two ways to become happier. One is to remove problems or external factors that are making you unhappy; one is to develop ways to be happier under the circumstances you face. (Compare: sometimes the best way to fix depression is to fix the problem that’s making you depressed; sometimes the best way is therapy and meds).

In this way I see us working on opposite ends of the problem–but also working in many ways at cross-purposes. I read you as very often arguing that the current system is deeply, maybe irredeemably fucked up. And that nearly the only possible response to it is to be unhappy and upset, and the reasonable response is to try to replace the system with something drastically different.

And I object to this two different ways. The boring one is that I think the current system is both pretty good and surprisingly good–in that it’s better than pretty much anything else we’ve had, and drastic changes are very likely to be very bad. So I’m deeply skeptical of all sorts of radicalism.

My relevant objection is that you’re telling people that being upset and unhappy is a reasonable and perhaps inevitable response to the world. And this is at cross purposes with my evangelical “go ahead and choose to be happy!” message. Things are actually pretty good, they’re getting better all the time, relax, enjoy your life. Don’t worry about what you “should” do.

And I realize–at least intellectually–that “just be happy” isn’t an instruction that most people can follow easily. (I had a bunchof interesting discussions about this a couple years back). But it’s still something people can move closer to.

A lot of my friends, and a lot of people I talk to on here, seem either to believe they “should” be unhappy–because they don’t deserve to be happy, or they haven’t earned it, or because other people are unhappy, or because unhappiness is the “rational” response to circumstances–or to have spent a lot of time feeling that way and to have spent a lot of time fighting off that implicit assumption.

I know you don’t actually believe that people should be unhappy. You want to make people happy. But the “everyone is alienated” narrative can be, and is, interpreted as arguign that anyone who thinks they’re happy are only fooling themselves. So if you think you’re happy, then stop.

The point of my blogging on these topics is to push back on that. Don’t worry. Be happy.

“What do I want people who read me to feel” is quite an intimidating question! I recommend most bloggers try to grapple with it at least once.

Fortunately this blog is largely not concerned with “what people feel” but rather telling the truth. I wish to practice kindness and compassion, but I can’t predict or control how people will respond to my words. I’m sure we’ve all had experiences where we really wanted someone to like us, or be comforted by us, or know how much we care about them, but no matter what words we used they would be interpreted in other ways and we would frustratingly end up even more alienated from them than we were to begin with. It’s easy to become obsessive about balancing the emotional reactions of all possible readers, which can lead to a deadlock where you shouldn’t say anything at all (or an explosion of your own repressed rage.)

I avoid that by just trying to tell the truth, and seeing what happens. 

If you are going to be angry, I can’t stop you nor do I feel any right to. But I would want you to be angry at the correct target. That fedora-wearing-youtuber or that purple-haired-twitter account is not the source of your misery, and I will mock the ideology that says they are.

Which may be why it seems I want people to be so angry at capitalism, or other systems that keep us enslaved. I don’t think that outrage is the necessary response, but if you are hurt and angry, then at least directing it against a system you can try to fix is more psychologically healthy than blaming a person or a group of people.

(I also spend time expressing understanding for suffering. As I said, I assume most of us are on tumblr because we’re very upset at the world. I do not think people lie about their emotions or fear - even your friend who misses her orange juice. I want to assure them that I really do understand and believe in their pain, I don’t think it’s “false” or “made up” or even, gasp, “performative.” I just think dealing with it requires an understanding of the true source of that pain. Hence the importance of understanding things like the Big Other, or ideology, or the futility of trying to control a chaotic world.)

I’m not telling anyone to be happy.

If you were asking for my advice on “okay I want to be happy, how do I do that?” I might have some different suggestions.

Embrace a nihilistic sense of responsibility. When you understand that you can’t control anything, especially the circumstances you find yourself in, that means you can no longer escape blame for your actions and thoughts (I’m only doing this because my job/friends/parents/the country wants me to, etc etc). They are fundamentally your choice and yours alone. This might sound scary but it’s actually incredibly freeing.

Our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction, to take fictions too seriously. It's, on the contrary, not to take fictions seriously enough. You think it's just a game? It's reality. It's more real than it appears to you. For example, people who play video games, they adopt a screen persona of a sadist, rapist, whatever. The idea is, in reality I'm a weak person, so in order to supplement my real life weakness, I adopt the false image of a strong, sexually promiscuous person, and so on and so on. So this would be the naïve reading... But what if we read it in the opposite way? That this strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self. In the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life, because of social constraints and so on, I'm not able to enact it. So that, precisely because I think it's only a game, it's only a persona, a self-image I adopt in virtual space, I can be there much more truthful. I can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self.

Zizek

If you care about other people and want them to value you, then work on that directly. Do not try to achieve things (fame, a good job, good looks) and then be valued for those. Find or build a trusted community where people do not abandon or denigrate each other based on changes in social status. Escape the rat race, as it were.

Express yourself through art and create things that are great, in order to believe you are a great person. @raggedjackscarlet and @hotelconcierge talk about this approach a lot, and although I don’t agree with a lot of their Discourse, they do seem happier than typical ideologues.

But mostly, just avoid the ideological traps that allow some Evil Other (Trumpistas, that judgy gossip at work, the people at church, videogame journalists.) to have control over your happiness.