People complain a lot about the “hot political takes interspersed with anime girls” Tumblrs, but I find them less jarring than the “hot political takes interspersed with GIFs of ejaculating penises” Tumblrs.
I am once again reminded that other peoples’ experiences of the internet can be very different from mine.
Now I’m wondering how many people reading this fall into the “this is a reminder of how different other people’s experiences can be” camp and how many into the “god, do I know that feel” camp.
(Personally, I’m in know-that-feel.)
I am also in know-that-feel territory.
I have literally never encountered pornography during my use of tumblr as a content aggregation/blogging site.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the *pornography* that was the unwanted interruption.
Possibly I should have put the rest of my original reply in the main text body rather than the tags:
#there is a time and a place for reading hot political takes and it is *not* while looking for porn #look I get that you want to demonstrate your SJ-ness in order to reassure people that #just because you write *fiction* about women getting brainwashed doesn’t mean you support The Patriarchy in actuality #but you could just *link* to your politics blog from your porn blog
—
(I mean, the penis GIFs *per se* are also annoying, but I accept that a search for porn will involve wading through some of those. Plenty of people *are* in fact into that sort of thing, even if I’m not.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #nsfw text
People complain a lot about the “hot political takes interspersed with anime girls” Tumblrs, but I find them less jarring than the “hot political takes interspersed with GIFs of ejaculating penises” Tumblrs.
I am once again reminded that other peoples’ experiences of the internet can be very different from mine.
Now I’m wondering how many people reading this fall into the “this is a reminder of how different other people’s experiences can be” camp and how many into the “god, do I know that feel” camp.
(Personally, I’m in know-that-feel.)
I am also in know-that-feel territory.
Tags:
#(November 2018) #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #sexuality and lack thereof #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #nsfw text?
Well, it’s not scientific, but I can think of maybe 2-3 people (including me) who started out fairly far to the right and are now pretty far to the left, and one person (you) who started out left a ways and has stayed there. The rest of the people I follow whose… political trajectories I’m aware of, which is maybe a dozen or so, seem to have started out sort of… mildly leftish-centrist and have moved further left with time. Like, there’s – I know there’s a norm of teenage rebellion and finding your own path, but my impression is that wide swings across the ideological center are fairly rare and may involve some kind of conversion/aversion experience.
(Bear in mind here that I’m very depressed, so this next part, I’m probably being more of a catty little bitch than is called for. But – like, I think we’ve discussed, you tend to run into a thing where people are like “Well, nobody is born feminist/whatever, we have to learn, go easy on us?” I genuinely don’t recall if that’s ever been me saying that, and like I say I could be totally wrong, but… like, my completely unsupported impression is, that kind of remark comes more from people who were born centrist, have liked to consider themselves quite left-wing progressive, and are just finding out that they’ve got a long fucking way to go and are feeling defensive about it? Like, pulling an example out of the air, somebody says “you know g*psy is a slur, right?”, and instead of “oh shit! no i didn’t know, sorry!”, they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!” it’s… like i say, i could be full of shit, but for me myself, that identity-thing of “don’t judge me, i didn’t know any better” got lost somewhere around the same time as “gayness is a SIN”. i mean, i still don’t like being seen as a fuckup, i imagine nobody does, but my mental image of people who say “nobody is born knowing whatever” is of kids who… still have that belief in their own Moral Rectitude, you know? who have never yet had to integrate into their identity the fact that they are A Person Who Can And Does Fuck Up. who feel like they need to defend the idea that they couldn’t have done any better, defend their… their honor, and that’s their go-to excuse because idk it fits their world paradigm or whatever.)
(sorry. i say “kids”. given that this conversation involves a discussion of authors younger than me having their shit together, and that you also are quite a lot younger than me, that’s probably a bad choice of words. but i’m failing to come up with a better one. :P)
again. large grain of salt. possibly a barrel of salt. or a very large crystal. a hunk of salt. i’m tired and depressed and pretty sure i’m not being terribly articulate. but that’s my impression: most people our age have started out pretty centrist, and i’d bet the ones who overgeneralize about “nobody grows up far-leftist” are included in that centrist-moving-leftward group.
Hmm. The thing is–and I know I often elide this–I don’t think I was exactly raised far-left per se. Like, there were groups (the ones that come to mind are black people and gay people) where people talked positively about them, but you never seemed to actually meet any. Trans people were mostly not on our radar, and when they were they were mostly viewed with vaguely benevolent confusion.
But I was raised left enough that when I did meet full-on social-justice folk, they didn’t feel foreign. I wasn’t exactly raised in SJ culture, but the place I was raised was…adjacent, somewhere close enough that SJ proper felt of-a-piece with it.
>>they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!”<<
For me, personally, while that reaction is correlated with childhood because I hang out on the Internet more as an adult, I think the main distinction is actually speech vs text. Offline!me’s* primary reaction to conflict is fight; Brin’s primary reaction is flight. My first emotion when called wrong is anger, but given a short time (usually short enough that textual communication will inherently give it to you) the anger is overwhelmed by fear. “If I crush the opposition they’ll stop hurting me!” becomes “As far as I can tell, I have never managed to successfully crush anyone, and I have no reason to think this will be the exception. Trying and failing to crush them will only prolong the fight and its associated pain. The only way of ending a fight that reliably works for me is complete and unconditional surrender, so that’s what I should do.” (Now that I’ve spent a lot of time in that frame of mind where my cowardice can shine through, I can even manage flight reactions in offline conflicts sometimes.)
(Apparently a lot of people are more the opposite? I mean, I guess they must be, or we wouldn’t have stuff along the lines of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. In a twisted sort of way, I suppose the existence of opposite people helped me; while I haven’t managed a 100% perfect record, I learned very fast that I could avoid a lot of fuckups by staying very quiet, observing, and letting other people make beginners’ mistakes for me.)
*My legal name would be less clunky, and I wouldn’t mind you knowing it, but I’m writing this publicly.
My commentary tags:
#it’s not really Learning to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #as much as #Learning It Is In My Self-Interest to Pretend to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #(people who are not motivated primarily by self-interest confuse me and I am often tripped up by them) #(what do you mean you’re professing [insert political stance here] because you think it’s correct) #(and not because you fear social repercussions for not supporting it or because it would benefit you personally?) #(how does *that* work?)
justice-turtle’s reply:
re your tags: I have a lot of trouble remembering that self-interest actually exists? as a thing people feel? emotions are *weird*, man. (in other notes, offline!me is extremely quiet and shy, while online!me often talks a big fight, but idk that either of those is “real” at this point. my identity / sense of self is super malleable right now. which might tie into self-interest / survival skills on another level, idek…) *wanders off making thinky faces*
Tags:
#(December 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
(I think there’s still a thing buried in my drafts where I tried to compose a response to this, but I never was able to phrase it well enough. Something about how I have a very hard time wrapping my head around the concept of [caring about political-type stuff for its own sake, rather than purely to appease people you think might hurt you], and so arguments that casually rely on this concept confuse me, and act as an unpleasant reminder of some of the parts of personhood I am missing.
…I suppose it’s fitting to come across this while my dash is experiencing a surge in voting discourse, which is very similar in that regard.)
—
Oh, interesting: I wrote this post just three weeks later. I guess my fumbling attempts to explain myself in this thread would have been a significant component of the stuff percolating at the time, then.
Tags:
#(September 2016) #conversational aglets #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #discourse cw? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #the humour of my people #Shakespeare #recs #according to AO3 there are three of them at the moment #so far I’ve read the first one and it’s hilarious #(my favourite part was ”I literally just returned”) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #death tw
tattoo artist who can encode magic into tattoos but doesn’t want people to know she can so she just puts low-level luck spells on her clients’ bodies without telling them
jeweller who makes body jewellery and pendants which have amulet properties and draw love and luck and happiness to their wearers without them realising it
piercing artist who keeps the remnants from her piercings and puts them all in little jars in the back of her shop to work sympathetic luck spells on all her clients
and then all three of them slowly realise what the others are doing and end up in a poly relationship living in a little shop in the shitty end of town, which gets curiously less shitty the longer they stay, and people think it’s just the development of the area but the three artists know
and they’re never rich and they’re never famous but they’re always happy because they have everything they need
they have the shop and they have their customers and they have each other
and when their customers are happy and content, they pack up and move on, all together now, to find another space with skin to be coloured and jewellery to be made and magic to be done.
DETROIT – The three body modification artists were arrested today on charges of voluntary manslaughter after a past client suffered a fatal stroke, allegedly due to thaumo-alchemical interactions between her prescribed potions and a luck charm that had been placed on one of her tattoos without her knowledge.
…
“Some potions and drugs are known to react with common charms, which is why it is absolutely essential that your doctor and pharmacist have a complete and accurate list of your active enchantments,” says pharmacist Patricia Patil. “Putting an enchantment of any kind, no matter how minor, on someone without their knowledge or permission is playing Russian Roulette with someone else’s life.”
…
The victim, Carmen Jackson, was 36 at the time of her death and is survived by a husband and 4 children.
“#death tw #yes this #I did not think this *exact* thing #but I did wonder why we were assumed to sympathise with people tricking others into taking spells”
Because consent isn’t part of our cultural narrative. Patriarchalism is – people assumed to be “wiser” doing what’s Best for other people without needing input from those stupid lower-class people who would reject the help out of fear and superstition and who never know what’s Actually Good for them.
Us, the lower classes and poors in this country, we know we’re shat on, but it’s still a long row to hoe challenging this internalized narrative, that if somebody who Knows Better than you (upperclass, educated, ~the Wise~) is doing what’s Good for you, they don’t need your consent or even to tell you what’s going on.
In skiffy, there’s a trope of the person who has to Decide The Fate Of Others angsting about it, feeling unworthy, actually addressingthe fact that they’re making big honkin’ decisions about people’s lives without their consent… but the angst isn’t about whether the decisions should be made (and in skiffy there generally isn’t time or any achievable way to get everybody’s input), but over whether THE PERSON ANGSTING is “worthy”, is Wise enough, because they weren’t brought up to feel that deciding the fate of others is their job, they feel it’s the job of those higher up the totem pole who’ve done the deciding on the person’s own fate. If they had more time, the ability to consult, it’s not suggested that they should take the opinions of the people whose lives will be affected, but of their superiors who have more of a “right” to fuck with people’s situations.
Perhaps so, although I distrust anything involving the word “internalised” for actually pretty much the same reason: it tends to carry a very similar note of “we know you better than you know yourself, if you disagree with us on what’s Actually Good for you it’s only because you lack insight* into your problems”. There’s no defence against a charge like that. (You’d think “I’m second-generation social justice; sure, I had some contact with other, patriarchal subcultures, but I’m not a proverbial fish and my native tongue does have a word for water (you should know, it’s the tongue you’re speaking now)” would have at least some effect, but nobody ever really seems to notice when I say that. Besides, we born-and-raised types are rare enough that everyone else routinely forgets we exist, and other people deserve not to have that pulled on them too.)
*Here used in the psych jargon sense of “awareness that something is wrong with your mind”.
Hmm. *thinky face is thinky* When I use “internalized” it’s always in the context of me and my own upbringing in a patriarchal subculture – e.g. here “this internalized narrative” was sort of shorthand for “I first read the OP as completely unproblematic, part of my brain went AUGH SUBVERSIVE LIARS BADWRONG DON’T LISTEN at the suggestion that it could be problematic, and so now I’m thinkyposting about why that happened” – so I didn’t even notice that it might read differently to other people.
*continues to thinky but not currently in words*
Tags:
#(June 2015) #(here is the other branch I was in) #conversational aglets #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #storytime
tattoo artist who can encode magic into tattoos but doesn’t want people to know she can so she just puts low-level luck spells on her clients’ bodies without telling them
jeweller who makes body jewellery and pendants which have amulet properties and draw love and luck and happiness to their wearers without them realising it
piercing artist who keeps the remnants from her piercings and puts them all in little jars in the back of her shop to work sympathetic luck spells on all her clients
and then all three of them slowly realise what the others are doing and end up in a poly relationship living in a little shop in the shitty end of town, which gets curiously less shitty the longer they stay, and people think it’s just the development of the area but the three artists know
and they’re never rich and they’re never famous but they’re always happy because they have everything they need
they have the shop and they have their customers and they have each other
and when their customers are happy and content, they pack up and move on, all together now, to find another space with skin to be coloured and jewellery to be made and magic to be done.
DETROIT – The three body modification artists were arrested today on charges of voluntary manslaughter after a past client suffered a fatal stroke, allegedly due to thaumo-alchemical interactions between her prescribed potions and a luck charm that had been placed on one of her tattoos without her knowledge.
…
“Some potions and drugs are known to react with common charms, which is why it is absolutely essential that your doctor and pharmacist have a complete and accurate list of your active enchantments,” says pharmacist Patricia Patil. “Putting an enchantment of any kind, no matter how minor, on someone without their knowledge or permission is playing Russian Roulette with someone else’s life.”
…
The victim, Carmen Jackson, was 36 at the time of her death and is survived by a husband and 4 children.
“#death tw #yes this #I did not think this *exact* thing #but I did wonder why we were assumed to sympathise with people tricking others into taking spells”
Because consent isn’t part of our cultural narrative. Patriarchalism is – people assumed to be “wiser” doing what’s Best for other people without needing input from those stupid lower-class people who would reject the help out of fear and superstition and who never know what’s Actually Good for them.
Us, the lower classes and poors in this country, we know we’re shat on, but it’s still a long row to hoe challenging this internalized narrative, that if somebody who Knows Better than you (upperclass, educated, ~the Wise~) is doing what’s Good for you, they don’t need your consent or even to tell you what’s going on.
In skiffy, there’s a trope of the person who has to Decide The Fate Of Others angsting about it, feeling unworthy, actually addressing the fact that they’re making big honkin’ decisions about people’s lives without their consent… but the angst isn’t about whether the decisions should be made (and in skiffy there generally isn’t time or any achievable way to get everybody’s input), but over whether THE PERSON ANGSTING is “worthy”, is Wise enough, because they weren’t brought up to feel that deciding the fate of others is their job, they feel it’s the job of those higher up the totem pole who’ve done the deciding on the person’s own fate. If they had more time, the ability to consult, it’s not suggested that they should take the opinions of the people whose lives will be affected, but of their superiors who have more of a “right” to fuck with people’s situations.
It took me five minutes to figure out ‘Skiffy” was sci-fi, but other than that I love every bit about this commentary.
It’s true. The angsting is always that the decision is “above my pay grade” – i.e, something that should be decided by higher ups. Not angsting that this is something that should be decided by those it affects, or should not be decided at all.
Okay, so I mostly try to avoid commentary on that post (OH MY GOD STOP HAUNTING ME, POST), but this one I feel the need to talk about, because it was both really encouraging and really hard for me to read. Aaaand it got long, like everything I write, so it’s going under a cut i guess
Hi! I’m the person who wrote those tags justice-turtle is responding to. I noticed this in the recent notes while pressing the “like” button on our conversation about it.
I admit I flinched when I realised you’d seen us talking negatively about your post (conflict-avoidance ftw), but it went surprisingly well. I’m glad you agree with the main point, and I’m sorry you keep having to see people taking the OP the wrong way.
Have you considered a note-blocker extension? You sound like you could really use one. People will still be taking your post at face value, unfortunately, but at least you won’t have reminders of that constantly thrown in your face. I’ve never used one myself (never had a post go viral), so I can’t recommend any particular one from personal experience, but XKit has a NotificationBlock extension and I’m pretty sure there are independent note-blocker add-ons too. (They generally work on individual posts, so you’d still get notes from your other posts.)
“I admit I flinched when I realised you’d seen us talking negatively about your post” – I WATCH YOU ALL I KNOW ALL I SEE ALL NO-ONE IS SAFE
but seriously, worrying people like that is one of the reasons I rarely respond to commentary on this post, b/c I too have conflict issues (…proooobably another reason I struggle with commentary like this, to be honest) and sympathise a lot with that lurching “oh crap they saw the thing” feeling.
I’m not sure I’d say people are taking the OP the wrong way, exactly. What worries me is that the way people are taking it – presenting the scenario as romantic and A-OK – is what’s presented in the post. So I can’t really say it’s wrong to read it that way, although it may have been wrong of me not to clarify in the post itself. I just continue to curse the fact that it went… “viral” may be a strong word, but close enough. That it spread so much.
Anyway, thank you, and I do keep meaning to get onto that XKit extension. Sadly, I am a loser who keeps whining about things and then not fixing them. HOORAY FOR LETHARGY!
(I know OP said they didn’t want people reblogging and especially necroing this post, but I’m going to go ahead for two reasons. First, this is a version including the explanation of how it wasn’t intended to be, as they put it, “romantic and A-OK”; second, OP hasn’t posted anything to northcentralpositronics-blog in over two years†, so it looks like they aren’t being subjected to the notestream from this post anymore regardless of whether they ever ended up installing a noteblocker.)
—
†If I understand their sidebar correctly, Tumblr fuckery locked them out of that account, and they had to get a new one.
Tags:
#(June 2015) #conversational aglets #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #storytime
Brain: so I noticed you were going over the lyrics of Do They Know It’s Christmas earlier
Me: Yeah, it came on the radio and I was thinking about making a Tumblr post about what a terrible song it is, how it paints Africa, a continent three times the size of the United States, as an undifferentiated sterile hellscape, how this is false to fact, insulting to many who live there, and strategically opposed to the message most people involved in relief/development efforts would prefer to communicate to westerners.
Brain: I didn’t understand anything you just said, but I assume it meant you want to hear it like all the time.
Me: That’s nothing like what I just said.
Brain: Don’t worry, I’ve got this.
Me: What? Wait, no…
Brain: And the Christmas bells that ring there / are the clanging chimes of doom / WELL TONIGHT THANK GOD IT’S THEM, INSTEAD OF YOOOOOOOU
Me: D:
the clanging chimes of doom though, seriously.
it’s the most bizarrely passive aggressive song of all time.
Geldof and Ure themselves later recognised the musical limitations of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”: in his typically blunt manner, Geldof told Australia’s Daily Telegraph in 2010, “I am responsible for two of the worst songs in history. The other one is ‘We Are the World’.”[42] Ure’s assessment was more considered, writing in his autobiography that “it is a song that has nothing to do with music. It was all about generating money… The song didn’t matter: the song was secondary, almost irrelevant.”
“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” has always been one of my favourite Christmas songs, but I am well known to be willing to overlook complete-bullshit poverty lyrics for the sake of pretty sounds.
(I actually did *not* get “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” stuck in my head upon reading this post, because instead my brain went “hey, did somebody say bullshit poverty songs that redeem themselves through sheer prettiness?” and began playing a Phil Collins medley.)
Tags:
#right now it’s mostly ”Heat on the Street” and ”We Wait and We Wonder” #reply via reblog #music #Christmas #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
Brinens and Things - Tumblr Mirror 