we all know I’m unkillable.
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse
Month: December 2018
Yes, Virginia, Tumblr is important for all those other reasons and also…
There is a particular take on the destruction of Tumblr that I keep waiting for someone to write, but no one has yet. Which means I apparently need to do it myself.
The take is, essentially, that not only should adults have access to adult content – in itself, valid and true – but also it is important to cultivate SOME social spaces where the overtly/explicitly sexual overlap with the non-sexual. (Not all spaces; I still think it should be illegal to have sex on the sidewalk. But SOME spaces that enable the sexual and the non-sexual to exist side-by-side)
Part of what I think leads to the dehumanization of sex (and subsequently allows the stigma and shame to cling so heavily to it) is the complete bifurcation of life into SEX and EVERYTHING ELSE and never the twain shall meet. When we – at every turn – put all aspects of human life into one sphere, and sex into another, we dehumanize it. We remove the full subjectivity of people from it, which is a problem.
I think we need to actively cultivate spaces LIKE before-time!Tumblr where we can be people, and talk about what happened at work today, and the funny thing our dog did, and how our parents make us crazy during the holidays, and how dare they do X thing on Supernatural, and here’s a great version of that distracted boyfriend meme, and ALSO be able to talk about being horny on main, as the saying goes, and find the right porn clip to fap to. Or post nude selfies. Or hunt down that sweet, sweet NSFW Symbrock fanart.
Having spaces where the explicitly sexual and the non-sexual overlap is important to humanizing sex and, subsequently, de-stigmatizing it (which, it should go without saying, is particularly salient for marginalized people who often suffer way more heavily from sexual stigma)
I think this should be the final word on my NSFW blog before Tumblr purges it. Ironic as it is, on a blog that was created to separate my horny from my main.
But there’s a reason that the tag on @sinesalvatorem that this blog sprung forth from was “#is this nsfw?” Because sometimes you just don’t know, and spaces where you can exist at that boundary are important in themselves.
Tags:
#yes this #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #sexuality and lack thereof #(fun fact: according to Know Your Meme the first known use of the term ”horny on main” was someone on hypno-fetishist Twitter)
But seriously, on the whole? I’m gonna miss this place when it finally enters it’s final FINAL FINAL death throes, because for all of its faults, all of its shitty design, Tumblr was undoubtedly great platform in one respect at least: the micro-blogging format here was ideal for lurkers.
Reblogging coupled with the unique style of tag-comments the fandom developed here suddenly made visible the big chains of lurkers who normally don’t interact with the work or its creator directly, but they pass it along in their own little circles, putting up your content up in their own spaces, adding all these heartwarming tags like “it’s great!!”, “omg i love u” or “i’d read that”s.
I create sometimes, when the mood strikes, but I was always mostly a lurker, actually! Especially back on LJ.
I’m old enough for my ancient, defunct LJ account with less than 10 entries to be still floating out there somewhere, and old enough that migrating to DW is less painful due to nostalgia factor. Yet, it is a nostalgia factor brought on mostly by the fact that for years, LJ was primary place to lurk on!
After clicking through all the “yep I’m old enough to view those entries :) :) :)” buttons on the way, of course.
((The image below: old-school “Lurker Day” LJ/DW banner, one of many you can still find out there – this one’s from https://soc-puppet.dreamwidth.org/))
This so hard. It’s the reason Tumblr became my home rather than any other social network.
Because Lurker is my creature-type. I started on Tumblr exclusively reblogging things and adding those little comments about what I liked about them. And I always felt like those comments were inadequate to express how much I got out of the thing, but I figured saying a small amount badly was better than nothing.
And then I gradually gained more confidence in the idea that I could say original things and they’d also be good. At least good to me. Maybe other people too, if they happened upon it, but that wasn’t necessary. It just had to be good to me.
And then, well, I became sinesalvatorem. Like, me. /I/ became this fucking blog. It stopped being a url I registered so Tumblr would let me have a dashboard to lurk a bunch of cool people. I became the blog because I was able to really believe that I could let my Self out here.
Which only happened because I had a place where I could reblog other people’s stuff with mediocre commentary, and that was OK. So it was also OK if my mediocre statements stood on their own. And maybe, eventually, stopped being mediocre – but only to the extent that I stopped caring if they were.
Because what mattered was (-matters -is) they’re /me/
Tags:
#same!!! #if I am capable of pulling off Dreamwidth blogging now it is only because Tumblr gave me the space to grow #and yes I have an LJ with one entry #(it’s an entry directing people to my Tumblr) #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #Livejournal #Dreamwidth #yes this
syntaxcoloring asked: Could you elaborate on the rationale for having reblogs deleted along with the original post? If I write out a lengthy, thoughtful response to something, and then the original poster gets embarrassed or whatever…well, it kind of sucks that they can just wipe out my response, doesn’t it?
We believe it is of utmost importance for users to have control of their content and how it is accessed. Tumblr’s structure encourages users to think of other people’s content that they reblog as partially their own, but we think that that mentality leads to a lot of the harassment and plain rudeness that has grown on Tumblr over the years. The fact that a post can be reblogged by others, ridiculed, and passed around endlessly after the original user has already decided they don’t want that content to exist and represent them anymore has always struck us as a massive design flaw. On Pillowfort a user’s post is always their post first and foremost, and all reblogs and comments to that post are still under the control of the original user. So yes, while it may be unfortunate to have a post you like disappear from your blog or lose a comment you left, we think it is still more important for a user to be able to delete their own content when they choose. I can’t think of any benefits to non-destructible reblogs that is worth having a user’s control over access to their own content taken away.
It’s worth noting that users can also delete any individual comments left on their post, because we want to encourage the notion that when you comment on someone’s post you are in THEIR space. It’s a bit of a shift from the way that Tumblr and Twitter have forced users to deal with anyone and everyone putting their own thoughts on your content, but we don’t think users should have to deal with the responses of people who may only be trying to spread harassment or otherwise exploit users’ lack of control over responses to act in bad faith, as we have all seen happen quite often.
I just want to make sure people thinking about migrating to pillowfort see this one, because this is an incredible example of a policy that was clearly not thought through by people who have ever tried to keep abusers from doing their thing.
This is a great policy, if your primary goal is to ensure that abusers cannot be challenged or disputed, ever. It is a great policy if you want to actively punish people for putting in any effort at all in conversations.
Yes, we think of things that we write in response to other people as “partially our own”, because we wrote some of the content in the post. When people put effort into responding to me, that effort is theirs. If I make a silly shitpost and someone responds with a 2,000 word essay, their post was more effort than mine.
Fuck’s sake. Look at the writing prompts blog. Think about how this plays out in Pillowfort’s world: You post writing prompts which are a sentence long, other people write multi-page responses, and you get to delete any of those responses any time you want leaving them with no record of the work or effort they put in, no way to retrieve the data, nothing.
Conclusion: If you go there, do not attempt to interact with other people. If you want to comment on something someone said, do it by starting a brand new post with no trace of direct connection to theirs, so it will probably be safe.
But really, just… Don’t. This is not sane.
“We designed a reblog system that discourages people from ever substantively using the reblog system.”
The maddening part is that I get it. That first paragraph does lay out real ways in which Tumblr is uniquely good at making sure that the dumbest thing you ever said on a social blogging platform becomes an unbanishable ghost that haunts your notifications forever. Clearly that’s not ideal.
But this doesn’t seem like a solution to me.
Why not, say, keep the content but divorce it from the original poster? Any deleted comments show up in reblogs with no attribution, or just a grey “deleted” icon, while disappearing from the OP’s blog.
To quote @chemicalkin:
Pillowfort is not a clone of tumblr, and does not have a reblog like tumblr.
Pillowfort reblogs are shares that point to the original post. You can’t add commentary to them.
Comments all take place in replies to the post, like livejournal on the OP’s blog. You’re not pulling them into your own space. Anyone who wants to read the full comment chain is going to the OP’s blog. Replying happens in OP’s blog. Again think of livejournal.
Hmm, that’s a potentially good point, especially as someone whose top choice for alternative is currently Dreamwidth. I might be being hypocritical about this. Let me check whether the above is true in the sense that I care about.
[a few minutes later]
Nope, it’s not [link]. Pulled the URL of the post on the top of DemoUser’s dash†, fed it into the Internet Archive’s “Save Page Now” field. The Archive *thought* it succeeded, but the archived page is a useless jumble of broken elements with none of the actual content (edit: upon closer inspection, the page title *is* intact, but nothing else). Compare this archived Dreamwidth post [link], which is perfectly fine right down to the formatting.
Since my plan for coping with the lack of reblogs on Dreamwidth is to post link roundups in which–and this is important–*every crawlable page includes a Wayback alternative link* [link], Pillowfort is still meaningfully worse for me.
(And, given how much Pillowfort uses [being able to erase your posts from existence] as a selling point, if I *did* figure out and enact a PF backup solution that worked on other people’s OPs, I expect a lot of people would be pissed about it. Pillowfort has deliberately tried to attract users who would be pissed about that in a way that Dreamwidth has not.)
—
Note that you *can* still erase your DW post from existence if you really want to: you can make it uncrawlable (most simply by friends-locking), delete it before the Internet Archive notices it, or request the Archive take it down. But Dreamwidth archivability is opt-out, while Pillowfort archivability is–at *best*–opt-in.
(I should probably note here, in case anyone is getting worried: I promise that if you give me access to your friends-locked posts, the only part of them that I will keep copies of is my own comments. No other comments, no OPs.)
—
†Link to the original post, and for when the post inevitably gets deleted some year or other: it’s a pair of pictures of sleeping cats by TheTiniestLizard.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #Dreamwidth #Pillowfort #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #amnesia cw
Accounting terms as a metaphor for life
I just had a conversation about the difference between conceptualizing your own life as something like a balance sheet, versus something like a profit & loss statement, and I’m finding this a surprisingly fruitful analogy.
Balance sheet: You are tracking assets and liabilities – a snapshot overview of your position in the world. Assets might be literal money and stuff, intangibles like skills, youth, attractiveness, family ties, or even more nebulous, like memories of good experiences. If you’re looking at your life from a balance sheet perspective, you are a collector, trying to gather and hold onto as much of the good as possible. Surveying your life and noting that you’re holding a good-sized pool of equity (of all types) will feel safe and successful. Giving up possessions, forgetting childhood memories, or drifting away from friends and family, might feel like losing a part of yourself. I associate this model with a diachronic sense of self.
(There is probably some possible analogy here re depreciation on assets, that I’m too tired to unpack right now).
Profit & loss: You are tracking revenue and expenditures – the rate of change over time, and whether your trajectory is positive on net. Recent good experiences, learning and personal growth and skills gained, and literal money-earning potential feel like success and safety, as does having more than enough energy and motivation to fuel your ongoing day-to-day life; putting in unsustainable amounts of effort, spending yourself to stay afloat, feels like the worst kind of failure. Your absolute position, and where you were five years ago, both matter less. Noticing that you’ve left something behind (friends, family, an old sense of self) in your race for forward momentum, probably doesn’t hurt as much. I associate this viewpoint with being more episodic.
I tend toward the profit & loss (which makes sense, I’m more episodic than many people I know), and I think I’ve moved even further in that direction in recent years, an adaptation to the life I’ve chosen – it doesn’t feel like I have the luxury to sit around accumulating assets and stability and a comfortable position to survey my life. The categories of revenue I’m currently pulling in are totally different from what I was tracking five years ago, when I was a nurse in Canada, and that seems fine. I’m not the same person as I was then.
I think this does make me more vulnerable towards vicious spirals in bad times, and over-updating on how things have gone recently.
I was unfamiliar with the terms “diachronic” and “episodic” sense of self, so I looked them up and found this [link].
The post mentions diachronics often “pitying” episodics, but I find my main emotion is not *pity* but *defensiveness*. The web of associations I’m getting is mostly people (they usually call themselves Buddhists; I don’t know enough about Buddhism to know how central an example they are) who think that [lacking a sense of a cohesive, continuous self] is both the objectively more true and subjectively superior way to live, and that the highest goal in life is to obtain it. IME, the one being pitied is usually *me*. I wonder what kind of circles 2012!RONBC travelled in.
Interestingly, given your examples, for much of my life “how much money do I currently have saved up” has been a *much* larger factor in the strength of my financial position than “how much income am I likely to make in the near future”. I’ve spent a *lot* of time over the years living primarily off of savings, and these days I do sometimes tend to view income, not as directly going to expenses, but as a way of acquiring savings that one then *actually* uses.
And come to think of it, this isn’t even the first time that someone has connected that with me having a stronger continuity of self [link], though not in quite the same sense that you’re talking about.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it’s interesting stuff.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #adventures in University Land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #amnesia cw?
“here are some alternates to tumblr! like newgrounds or pixiv” yall just, straight up stopped suggesting sites even remotely similar to tumblr and are just saying random shit now. guys lets all move to the comments section of youtube
you’re not thinking big enough. time to move to target dot com product reviews.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse
Brinens and Things 