Hey, its form folllows function to the teary end!

this is a blog post about how blogs suck

i like fireworks a lot but we always used to go way out in the sticks to shoot them off to not bother neighbors. they deserve all the same considerations as if you were doing recreational shooting, at least. i think banning them within city limits or anywhere else that's not a good long distance away from where folks live is perfectly reasonable.

fireworks are one of those weird things that people are fiercely protective of for what feels like no reason. any attempt at regulating or curbing the use of fireworks leads to a bunch of seemingly normal becoming dont tread on me freaks, screaming about the nanny state

i feel compelled to defend tumblr because the only difference between tumblr and twitter is that journalists and other people with social cachet (at least social cachet that exists outside of tumblr) (and i use that term for lack of a better one) use twitter

while i completely understand and more often than not agree with negative descriptions of tumblr i think that often the way people dismiss it is gendered/racialised/etc in the sense that people view it as the SJW den of iniquity, where modern thinking around gender/transness was birthed. and obviously there are bad takes coming out of tumblr but i feel like we dont have this perception of sites like, idk, reddit (which i feel people sort of perceive as sort of obnoxious home for reply guys but nothing worse than that) or like even in the last few years 4chan??? obviously this is all based on my standpoint as a person who uses some sites and follows some people.

idk what my point really is. i suppose i just want people to not dismiss tumblr out of hand, because in some ways, doing so backs up years of misogynist freakery around tumblr as this hellpit where the tendrils of cultural marxism creep into internet society

Definitely 90% of the abuse you hear about on Tumblr is fandom related.

Reading this is pretty curious because I sorta drifted onto Tumblr not for fandom but because it seemed like it was like the non-discussion parts of Reddit without the shit, or rather, you could filter out the shit somewhat effectively. When I was starting to use Tumblr, I liked Reddit most for its nice places for "porniverse" (great pictures of whatever from architecture to animals), learning focused subs from /r/askphilosophy to /r/languagelearning and some humor. The first and the last things were pretty well served by Tumblr and still is, but I think the leak of energy out of Tumblr has been noticeable.

And the alternatives to Tumblr have gotten better from my perspective. As much as I don't really like a lot of Instagram bullshit, it's probably the better platform for finding aesthetic pictures when you just have an acute need to see a field of cosmos flowers and Twitter seems somewhat less dysfunctional in the end and it's actually possible to interact there.

Tumblr is pretty much the first platform I've used for fandom and that usage has really decayed something fierce much like the article says. There really is something on the structural side of the service that causes much of the issues. The privacy options don't make much sense especially if you're creating a blog that's meant to be visible to non-members. Which is sad, because I'd love to have a little blog that's easy to set up and trivial to run for uncomplicated content, without the expectation of much social media engagement or setting or some Wordpress shit.

i agree that tumblr has gotten somewhat worse over the years, but my own experiences haven't been as bad as this article suggests. i am not really involved or interested in specifically fandom-type content, though, and that's what this article seems to really heavily focus on

Jesse Singal

I am not gonna be surprised when he turns out to be a secret fascist.

also for this post i had to assume his pronouns - screen shot of his "about me" page

edit: oh wait i guess i could have started reading the article before sharing my hot take

I mean these are people who probably ostensibly support affirmative action yet didn't think through the implications of having a group like this, organized like this might have?

yes good

I love this post so much, it explains not just the amount of transphobic nonsense in left leaning media but why they keep getting so much shit other shit wrong. They really don't listen to anyone but themselves.

"The Twitter cliche that the user with an anime avatar harraging your mentions is as likely to be a nazi as communist is an easy go-to example of how fans of the same or similar works might be—obviously “fans of…” don’t universally share the same politics, identities, and beliefs."

it's worth interrogating the racial implications of interpreting people with "anime avatars" to be a homogeneous group, in the context of dismissing people for participating in the cultural output of an international subculture. not strictly related to the article but something i've been thinking about lately

"I think of some of the disturbingly hateful reactions I’ve seen over the past few years to the work of queer women who are exploring difficult, messy, incomplete feelings, as if they had done real harm by not being sufficiently perfect in their processing, depicting situations that didn’t slot neatly into the positive and self-loving way we demand that women embody."

i think that its important to be kind in interpreting and criticising works that arent out of the mouth of corporations but at the same time "messy feelings" might genuinely be troublesome and in some cases reactionary or even sort of evil, especially when dealing with the messy feelings that arise from forming your sexual/gender/Queer identity on the internet as a teenager like most of us did.

i also think that the majority of these reactions to "the work of queer women who are exploring difficult, messy, incomplete feelings" come from other "queer" people, often who probably dont run in the san francisco/portland/new york/gdc social circles and who dont have large followings like these "creators" that the op is obliquely referring to often do. social media is almost inherently designed so that the reactions to these works will be seen by the creator. i dont think its unfair to categorise these reactions of queer people interpreting creations depicting "difficult, messy, incomplete feelings" as being difficult, messy, and incomplete themselves.

This is the good shit. None of these problems will be solved without platform changes.

i wonder what her life will be like in a year

Why have I never heard of freebase nicotine before? Sounds like the real culprit here.

i really wanted to read this but my nicotine cravings just got way too strong lol

the concept of a teen wilfully saying “juuling is really what’s up" tickles me to no end. anyway these companies have gentrified cigarettes and sold them to children for profit and their executives should be drowned in the san francisco bay

i guess snus is passé now?

I am so out of touch

Honestly this article is, like, so good.

the thing with Contra is she makes good points but I really don't like her style or humour at all and it really put me off watching her videos

yea it's real good

This article goes over a books worth of stuff so yea there's a ton of things left out. I still like it tho.

this is a good article. the section talking about the declining birth rate fails to mention climate change, which is (at least among me and my 20/30something friends) the #1 reason why nobody wants to procreate. i kinda wish they'd at least mentioned it.