“lurkers DESTROY Tumblr” Is Such An Unhinged Take I Am Sorry But You Do You, Lurkers. Make Your Accounts.

this idea came to me in the shower and I actually doubled over because I was laughing so hard

If you fucks actually go through with not voting on your next USA president elections and subsequently lead Trump to power again.

Yes. Yes I'm going to blame every single American for that. Collective responsibility and all that jazz.

See you in the New Year.

what do you think of tone indicators in general?

unfortunately my thoughts on tone indicators are somewhat nuanced. fortunately, this is tumblr not twitter, so I can just write out my full thoughts in one post and be as verbose about it as feels necessary.

speaking as an autistic person (and I know there are other autistic people who don't hold this same view, this is just my perspective), I think as an accessibility tool, the extended set tone indicators in current popular use is fundamentally misguided.

the oldest ones, /s for sarcasm and /j for jokes, make sense. their notation isn't the most intuitive thing ("does /s mean sarcastic or serious?") but it's not too difficult to explain what they mean. I've had to spend my whole life learning by brute force what different tones of voice mean and what they change about how I'm supposed to interpret something, so I already know what "read this in a sarcastic voice" and "read this as a joke" are supposed to mean. my existing skills can be translated into the new form without too much effort.

the same thing applies to emoji and emoticons. I know what facial expressions mean, because I had to learn what they mean. figuring out if :) is sincere or not from context is a skill I've already needed to develop. it doesn't come naturally for me, but it's something I already at least somewhat know how to do.

most of the tone indicators in current use uh. don't work like this.

tone indicators like /ref or /nbh don't correspond to specific tones of voice. I don't have a "I'm making a reference" voice or a "I'm not talking about a person who's here" voice that I can picture the sentence being read in. these do not indicate tones, they're purely disambiguators. they clarify what something means without necessarily changing how it would be read out loud.

and on paper, that's fine, right? like, it's theoretically a good thing to take an otherwise ambiguous statement and add something to it that clarifies what you meant by it. the problem is that these non-tone tone indicators are not even remotely self-explanatory. it's up to me, the person who is being clarified to, to know what all these acronyms are supposed to mean, and how they change the way I'm supposed to interpret what something means.

it's, quite literally, a newly-invented second set of social cues that I'm expected to learn separately from the set that I've already spent my whole life figuring out, and it works completely differently.

sure, these rules are (in principle) less arbitrary than the rules of facial expressions and tones of voice and how long you're supposed to wait before it's your turn to speak, but they're also fully artificial and recently invented, which means they're currently in a constant state of flux. tone indicators go in and out of fashion all the time, and the "comprehensive lists" are never helpful.

in theory, I appreciate the idea of people going out of their way to clarify what they mean by potentially ambiguous things they post online. if it worked, that would be a really nice thing to do.

however, sometimes I imagine what the internet would be like without them. what if instead of using /s, the expectation was that if you're sarcastic online there's no guarantee that strangers reading your post will know what you meant? what if instead of inventing more and more acronyms to cover every possible potentially confusing situation, we just... expected one another to speak less ambiguously in the first place?

so, I on paper like the idea of tone indicators. I think it's good that some people are trying to be considerate by being extra clear about what they mean by things. but if tone indicators didn't exist, and people who wanted to be considerate in this way instead just made a point of phrasing things more clearly to begin with, I think that would be vastly preferable to even the most well-implemented tone indicator system.

also /pos sucks because there's something deeply and profoundly wrong for an abbreviation that means "I don't mean this as an insult, don't worry" to be spelled the same way as an acronym that's an insult

there is something so cool about the prefix dis- in words. dispassionate. disillusioned. disuse. dis- doesnt just mean an absence, it means the essence of the word has been leeched out. your passion has been sucked dry. your blissful ignorance has been torn away. the object is forgotten somewhere knowing the joy of being loved and used and the shame of becoming unneeded even more so.

happy ace awareness week

“ace people can still have sex or engage in sexual activities” and “no one, including ace people, is obliged to have sex, enjoy sexual activities, media, or kinks, and it’s super okay to never engage in any of those things if you don’t want” are ideas that can and should coexist

I love when people are like “I can’t believe you reblogged that despite their user name, icon, bio, and last twenty posts” bc to me my dash is the only part of this website and I’m not slowing down to look at urls you could all be the same person

A particularly nasty side to antisemitism — it’s been part of Ye’s message recently though it is by no means unique to him — is this implication that they’re just the ones saying out loud what the rest of us are thinking. And I just want to say, unequivocally, fuck you. You don’t get to claim me. You don’t get to use me as a bullet against people I care about. It’s not what I think, and I’m confident it’s not what any of my friends think because if I wasn’t confident, they wouldn’t be my friends. I’m not silently agreeing with you — I’m VOCALLY disagreeing with you. Your beliefs are pathetic. Go fuck yourself.

I really really REALLY don't want to be the antisemitism mutual again bc y'all do not know how much damage that did to my mental health. But the fact that goyim only ever mention the antisemitism in what is literally blood libel: the game as an afterthought, sometimes not even expressing it by name, and instead focusing on the trans issue - I'm saying this as a trans Jew: fucking stop it. Even if not one single penny ended up in jkr's hands bc of this game it would still be extremely harmful. Stop saying "even ignoring the game's moral problems" or "not even mentioning the antisemitism". MENTION THE ANTISEMITISM. This is a game teaching fascist ideals to PRETEENS. It is teaching them that Jewish caricatures deserve to DIE for the crime of wanting their cultural artifacts back, it is teaching them that Jewish caricatures wanting to no longer be oppressed is equal to murdering "wizards" (aka white goyim) (while the main character literally discovers they're pure bloods...) and kidnapping children - THE OLDEST FORM OF BLOOD LIBEL. Jewish lives MATTER. I'm saying this as a trans Jew, but cishet, able bodied, white, neurotypical Jews also deserve to be safe. We all deserve to be able to exist as Jews without being targeted. Antisemitic hate crimes has been on the rise by hundreds of percentages worldwide, especially in the US and Europe. Stop treating us as afterthoughts.