Every Time I See Another Ibuprofen Post On This Site I'm Like STOP

i dunno who needs to hear this but viz just put death note, inuyasha (all eps plus the movies), hunter x hunter (seasons 1-3), naruto (seasons 1-8), and sailor moon for free on youtube (subs only, and the sailor moon playlist includes the first three seasons of the reboot too). go HAM EVERYBODY!!!

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 you Disney gays need to understand.

The Walt Disney Corporation never has, and never will be, your friend or ally.

Disney is a multi billion dollar conglomerate.

Their one and only goal is to make more money than they did the previous year.

That is it.

They aren't trying to help you or your community.

Any politics they have either reflects the best way for them to make money or it was because someone put political pressure on them to do it. Or it is a publicity stunt.

"But what about creators like Dana Terrace? Or the history of queer people in animation?"

Listen to me. Artists like Dana and others do not work at The Rat because they want to.

They work there because Disney buys up every other little animation company there is and shuts it down, ensuring that any money being made from the medium is going to them.

DreamWorks and a tiny handful of others are the only ones left in western animation.

I am not kidding.

Blue Sky, who made Ice Age, was one of Disneys latest victims.

They shut down all production, even for things that were nearly complete, on all products that did not fit their brand.

Such as the movie adaption of Lumber Janes, a queer focused comic by ND Stevenson (creator of the She-Ra reboot).

As for the historical guys, such as Howard Ashman AKA the father of the Disney Renaissance, they may have worked there and done amazing things but it doesn't mean they were respected by the company.

Howard and his fellow gay artists were only allotted the creative freedom to work because at the time Disney was nearly penniless and this was a last ditch effort to save the company.

Gay artists may have risen Disney up, but it does not mean that the company cares for them or us.

In the eyes of these boardroom execs, the artists are tools needed to make a profit.

And gay consumers are the fools who will buy the rainbows-colored sweatshop produced products and call the company woke.

So. What can we do about this?

Rule #1: Avoid giving Disney money at all costs.

I know this is really hard because they own literally everything. But do your best.

This also includes any of their streaming services.

Buy used DVDs or just pirate.

And before anyone gets their panties in a wad about wanting support queer creators like Dana Terrace, let me remind you:

Creators and animators are paid a lump some regardless of if something does well or not.

All that revenue produced by things like Gravity Falls or Luca goes to the execs and stock holders, not the people responsible.

Rule #2- Support artists directly

If you like things like The Owl House and Dana Terrace's work, make a lot of noise about it on social media.

Buzz absolutely is a currency and the more that is generated, the more likely that these things will get renewed.

Rule #3- Support Unions

Unions are what keeps artists from being treated like slaves.

And any union (regardless of background or career) is a good union.

Rule #4- Do not fall for Disney's bullshit

No matter how progressive they may seem, there is always an ulterior motive and always a catch.

They are not our allies no matter what.

you ever have a

moment with an entire fandom's perception of a character

"isnt bullying recognized as a form of abuse" the thing is, like, not broadly, societally speaking... i mean think of all the posts u see regularly that are like, "bring back bullying" etc. "everyone needs to get bullied a little it builds character." can u imagine people making these statements broadly about abuse? bring back abuse? abuse builds character? nah and that is because people do not think of bullying as abuse, they do not think of it as traumatic and i actually think this is in large part because it is seen as an issue that only affects children (not even true) and people still broadly feel that children's feelings and experiences do not matter

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.

REBLOG IF YOU'RE A DRAGON