#infinitely more times irl than in any online space

[cock-holliday]

I keep seeing sentiments about how Americans knowing about JKR being a terf is a very tumblr thing and that a lot of people don’t know she sucks ass.

I will say that 1. Even American mainstream news reports on her bullshit a lot and frequently and has for years so if you consume literally any news you’ve probably heard this 2. I do not know a single UK citizen, tumblr-poisoned or not who isn’t aware of this now if they give the slightest fuck about queer people because she is very very publicly funding hate drives and speaking at events and continuously writing thinkpieces affecting public life. Somehow because it’s not HERE it allegedly requires niche SJW knowledge to be aware of her open, public campaign.

I do agree that not everyone who still participates in HP shit “must” know, especially kids, but I think it’s very ignorant to pretend it’s a minority of people who are aware when 5+ years ago NBC and NPR and EW and US weekly and fucking Business Insider wrote pieces like “Rowling Under Fire For Transphobia Once More”

It is wholeheartedly a public conversation here.

#I think it also does a disservice to conflate ignorance with willful ignorance #I have heard the expressions #‘death of the author’ #and ‘well I still like it’ #or ‘but hp means a lot to me’ #or ‘well I don’t think that was ACTUALLY transphobic’ #infinitely more times irl than in any online space #there IS a high level of awareness here #but a super strong discomfort with doing something about it #HP books showed up everywhere in donation drives and for sale #having grown up in the heart of US fandom space for it—I went to book releases and saw every movie in theater #there has been a remarkable shift since like 2018? in how HP is viewed here #quiet shame from fans in a place where Disney adults are unapologetic #is not because it’s ‘nerdy’ suddenly #people are AWARE here #we needn’t cover for that

[bromantically]

smth that always sort of frustrates me is when (albeit well meaning) queer people on here are giving advice to younger queers and their first advice every single time is to participate in irl queer communities and make irl queer friends. which is something i agree is great! however, its always presented in a way that kind of bothers me

they always frame it like 1.) irl queer interactions are inherently accessible and 2.) irl queer interactions are inherently more valuable than online ones

and as someone who lives in texas in the southern us u can probably imagine why thats not an option for me. my town has never had a pride parade. we have never had a queer club or any sort of queer event or any even remotely queer-centric places to go to. i couldnt even use the word queer when submitting a suggestion to my city for a pride parade. the closest pride parade to me is in a large city 2 hours away that i cant even remotely access. we dont even get to have rainbow capitalism.

i would love to interact w irl queer communities. i would love to have more queer friends irl. i would love to help start a queer community in my town. but the fact of the matter is thats not possible where i live, especially considering the currently tightening grip the texas government has on trans topics

so i just wanted to say that if this sounds familiar to u, ur online queer spaces and friends are just as valuable as any irl ones. we dont get to be picky, so we have to value this. i hope we all get to experience a flourishing irl queer community at some point, but im also infinitely grateful to have the online communities i already have

#kitty purrs #ok to rb #saw another post about queer advice that kind of frustrated me #bc it kept framing online spaces as worthless and bad #framing online spaces as something to avoid at all costs. as smth inherently negative #this is all i have. i dont get an irl queer community. #i went to a town a couple months ago and saw little pride flags in a store and almost cried #bc we dont even get to have that #we dont get anything for pride here. we dont even get rainbow capitalism #so like. yeah. my online community and friends are one of the most important things in the world to me

[blog-name-idk]

I'm visiting my family overseas, so I haven't really had any time to write or exist in online spaces. But I would like to formally acknowledge that despite this being a very strange year, I think meeting a lot of specific people in this community have helped me become/accept myself more than ever in my life.

To @madbutgloriouspond, I don't even know what to say, really. My first reader-turned beta-turned friend-turned confidant-turned indispensable part of my life. You are fucking amazing in every way and I'm so blessed that we found our way into each other's spheres. I love you so much.

To @nabiolive thank you for just being so unapologetic, sexily you, and helping me unlock my unhinged murderbaby love. Along with our tamer, bottom brat sides lololol. I love that we can just dump parts of our WIPs to each other without worrying about being annoying. Well I mean, it's not annoying when you do for me because 👉👌👀

@eserethriddle I don't even really know what to say? We just fucking *click* ya know? I'm so excited for our joint fic, and your thesis, and like IDK you're fucking awesome and fucking apply for a Visa to come visit the US.

@taestefully-in-luv @persphonesorchid @bangtansmauyeondan @btsstan12

I tagged Jiya even though she deactivated bc truly, everyone tagged here has truly changed my life in the best way this year. I only got into BTS themselves December of last year because of NPR Tiny Desk. I dabbled in fanfiction - mostly reading (though some writing) - since I was like 12... so 18+ years ago... and truly, this was the first time I ever felt like I was part of a community. And a GOOD community at that. There are so many weird/concerning ones out there, the type that are the reason I hide my BTS fanfic obsession IRL, but you are all the reason I've started to be more open about it.

To everyone I've tagged here, and to anyone who has liked or kudo'd or shared my stuff, THANK YOU! I started certain fanfictions for myself l, but the reason I've continued is for all the connections (reciprocated or not) that I've made. Your kind words (and even simply interactions) do make all the difference, and even if I don't reply I am infinitely grateful.

I am so lucky to be a part of such a lovely, wonderful community. Truly, becoming a part of this had been the best part of my 2022. Thank you so much.

[dirhwangdaseul-archived]

my assessment of the whole slur thing is that the misunderstanding of reclamation and the inherent antiblackness of it is at the center of it but it also piles up with this desire by misguided kids and adults as well whose interaction with the "community" has been either short lived or non existant outside of online spaces that they perceive to be replacement of like irl interactions because idk how else to explain that they keep trying to draw these very clear lines about the history of words about who gets to use them as if it came with like being gay and like its really never been sth organized in the way that a political history might draw it as these tightly knitted groups that always agreed on everything like how could you think that when dyke fag marica puto lencha etc have been used against bisexual and trans people no matter the gender consistently as well as any other fucking slur is interchangeable when it really comes down to putting us down and then there's terfs and then there's white bitches always putting whiteness and comfort and capital over a "community" like idk how there's so fucking much time for the right words for every single thing when like community has never meant just words it's like action, it's alive, it changes and its supposed to recognize its actual history like what reality are these kids living in when they can say stupid shit like wlw can't say the words used against them or the ones that historically have also identified them because they fucking wished for it and at the same time say that queer has been successfully reclaimed when people from the fucking community specially elders have said that it makes them uncomfortable like do these kids just don't think anyone older than them exists with maybe literature to read like wtf is the internet for if these kids come as stupid as we did when running away from home at 16 and crashing into the nearest gay place everybody talked abut in whispers like progress where progress where if they keep trying to draw nonsensical lines about things that have always felt so cruelly ephemeral and that we must cherish or else no one will, families get made and they break and some others get to be reunited and others face endless violence and others get chances and still don't get to succeed and people still come and go like tell me in what world does it make for a static community whose lines cannot be redrawn to give space for more people to come and go in the hopes they grow like idk what im saying im like so fucking tired of idiotic takes that don't appreciate the nuance of the life given specially when it comes to the infinite ways lgbteeeeees have found to express ourselves in the world like fuck the gift of being seen should mean more openness more attention to the history of where we came and what fucking multiple meanings can be derived from sth yes even violence that for our time in this earth is still what most people will get like that should be space for more kindness more listening god....

#el suco posts #long post

[thedreadvampy]

Like not to get discoursey but. I think there's a difference between the use of language to describe and explore your personal experience of your gender and sexuality vs the use of language to describe and define large community groups and classes. by which I mean there's a difference between eg taking about your personal connection to lesbianism and saying Lesbians Are X

like. the personal is experiential. the communal is material. and I think a lot of (very tedious) LGBTQ discourse is about people treating them as interchangeable. when we're talking about. oppression and social dynamics. the primary driver is how you're understood by others (and how the fear of how you will be understood by others affects your behaviour). that doesn't mean there's no place to speak about your own messy experience with idea and identifiers that you maybe feel partially, or invisibly, or that speak to your complex experience of self.

like. exploring parts of your identity is a really vital part of being queer imo. it's one of the beautiful things about this community. to be able to try on different hats or say I'm a bit this but a bit that, to question and to say 'look I know this might not make sense but it's true for me' and to be messily complex in your understanding of who you are and what you want. but like. that's a discussion About You that's for you and your friends and the people who know you and love you. and the problem imo is that the nature of social media is such that musing about and claiming your own identity vs discussing community issues are the same forum.

like the thing is saying "I feel bi but also lesbian? like I think my deal is that I'm a bi lesbian?" kind of. Makes perfect sense to me on a personal level. I also waver back and forth on my relationship to lesbianism. similarly I definitely know lesbians who still consider themselves lesbians (or lesbian-with-an-exception) as a personal identity but who are dating men bc their partners transitioned and they found they still wanted to be with them, or men who consider themselves lesbians bc their identity has been so tied up with lesbianism before they realised they were men. and like I'm not a lesbian and I'm not trans and I'm not here to litigate whether that's right or wrong, largely because tbh it Just Is. Like regardless of the philosophical implications, sometimes the truth of how someone feels about their identity at their core is just. Messy. And often contradictory. And part of coming to terms with that involves having the space and words to acknowledge it, and to acknowledge the messiness and contradictions in it.

but on a community level, ehhhhhhh like lesbian is specifically a term used politically and socially to describe the material reality of being a woman who loves women and doesn't have a desire for a relationship with men. and when you say "lesbians can be attracted to men!!!!!" or "men can be lesbians!!!!" there is a shrinking linguistic space to define the specific experience of Being A Woman Only Liking Women. which is a meaningful social and political category distinct from Man Who Likes Women or Bisexual Woman.

the thing is that sexuality and gender labels are, by their nature, extremely broad. like we're talking about labels that describe millions or tens of millions of people. they're not going to capture everyone's experience perfectly and without exception. community labels are indicative, they're describing a simplified core experience and for any given group identity (LGBTQ or otherwise) there will be people who match it up perfectly and people who are. out on the blurry edges of the term. but who sufficiently identify with the core concept to find it a relevant term. that doesn't mean the label needs to constantly shift to be specific to Them, The Person Using It. Any time a term is describing more than one person there absolutely will be parts of some group member's identity that don't fit perfectly in the boundaries of it, aspects of the assumed experience that are either missing or different or too small or too large to fit. but that doesn't mean the label is wrong, it just means human experience and identity is infinitely complex. Identity isn't a box, it's a cluster range. and it's frustrating to not be able to talk about what resonates and what doesn't in any given terminology without it being taken as a statement on How That Term Should Be Defined To Fit Me, Personally.

like irl I have a lot of conversations about how I feel about my personal relationship to queerness, to bisexuality, to lesbianism, to butchness, to dykery, to asexuality, to heterosexuality, to cis womanhood, to nonbinary womanhood, to traditionally gay male and trans female forms of expression and language. like it's Messy but it's also rich and valuable and honest. but I generally. steer clear of that on here bc when you talk about it online, in an open forum, every personal statement is taken as a general proclamation. and we get into Who's Allowed To Talk About What and Whose Label Is Whose and it's all. fuckin. Discourse about What The Rules Are. it's just. frustrating.

[honexjams]

just was watching an ftm tiktok compilation that featured kalvin garrah and it got me heated, i have a LOT to say about him and his influence but i will condense it to this:

all trans people have an era of discovery and experimentation, for some that includes experimenting with pronouns online to see what theyre comfortable with. the rise in people IDing with they/them or they/she or they/he is infinitely more to do with more trans kids feeling comfortable to experiment than it is with unconcerned cis people wanting clout. (i know some cis people do ID as lgbt for attention, i grew up in a very depressed/depressing and drug-laden small town where its not unheard of for people, especially young people, to go to strange lengths for relief, comfort, and entertainment. this small amount does not tend to go through the worst of the treatment i had as a young, binary trans person in this parish, which alone will garuntee those folks didnt ID this way 'for funzies' very long)

writing off all of these young people as simply wanting attention is harmful to both nonbinary people directly and binary trans people who are young and trying to figure out what theyre comfortable with.

i can say for myself personally, that i am very sensitive so if the trans online sphere was as critical in 2012 as it is today, it probably wouldve thrown a wrench in my personal process of understanding my feelings and realizing the transphobic responses i got from coming out were just that and not the absolute truth. which wouldve in turn left me IDing as non-binary or nothing at all online for a longer time because i wouldve been more concerned with my fear of seeming like i wanted attention online than actually trying to nut up and come out at school or do anything i needed to do irl for my comfort.

i first listed my pronouns on a writing site thats mostly barren last i checked, and what i put was "he/him/they/them" because i was at a place where i was caught between what i felt was true about myself, and having just come out to my mother as an 11-year-old and her not believing me.

demonizing non binary pronouns and identities will 100% effect this generation of trans kids because for those with no support, they will turn to the internet. when both their real life and the online spaces they go to are highly critical and unaccepting of nonbinary identities, any kid less than 100% sure theyre a binary trans person will suffer at the very least an extended period of confusion and denial, and at worst never fully come to grips with who they are.

ive always felt really strongly about this but i feel as i hit the 10 year mark of knowing i was trans (and still being pretty young at 20yo) its a good time to express these feelings a little more formally than i tend to. especially because i fit into the like, Ideal Trans Experience of knowing i was a boy at a young age (i mentioned finding trans people at 11 but i have Very early memories of telling other kids on the playground that 'i was born a boy who looked like a girl so my parents raised me as a girl' which is dummy accurate to a trans experience often shown in media yk).

(this next paragraph is all personal anecdotes which are important to my point but if you dont care feel free to skip over it)

I do very much believe and accept nonbinary people as truth because i can understand how someone can feel like something that isnt understandable to the society they grew up in because that was my experience as an lgbt person in the deep south. I remember hearing my mom at a local parade (a Very Community-Focused thing where i grew up), see two teen girls holding hands walking down the street and saying "theyre a little young for that, huh?" to a friend, I remember asking her what 'gay' meant as a kid bc ofc i heard it at school and just wanted padding for if i ever said it out loud because as i knew it, wasnt a curse word but it was Bad Word (bc i knew from hearing it around school that it was a Bad Word)i wanted to know what it meant, she said "some boys date boys, its not really a Good lifestyle, but sometimes they do it". Ive heard many transmedicalists say 'how can you have dysphoria for nothing?' as in how can someone be agender. I am a binary trans man in a committed relationship with another man and I am frankly bewildered as to how a binary trans person can believe such a thing as 'the only genders that exist are ones i know about, even after discovering my own queerness' because I can perfectly understand the correlation between binary and nonbinary trans people. For me, growing up as a teenager in the south in the 2010s, gays were vaguely accepted but still ostrisized, and in school i had a classmate who i knew is a binary trans man because i still know him now, and I, my insecure, weak, self concious self emailed my teachers about my pronouns and name while he was still being called his birthname in class and my cousin, who sat in front of me next to him (thats how small a fown this is) was the only person who called him his chosen name, which was how i figured he was like me.

I personally dont want bottom surgery even tho i Fully identify as a binary male, I simply came to the understanding that a 'cis penis' is not something I will ever have so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ may aswell get used to the things i can tolerate, unlike my chest and 'feminine' features that T has changed.

Long story short if You are a binary trans person who doesn't get what the whole nonbinary thing is all about, simply try describing your own trans experience as if you were really not a boy or girl. As if you really, through your deepest soul-searching, came up with the fact that you simply dont identify with neither male nor female.

Back to the original point of binary trans people in a self descovery phase, if You are a binary trans person? try to remember the first time you felt really invalidated in a way that truly struck you as like, a direct attack on how you feel (like how those depressing 'relatable posts' do), did you ever feel like if that was something you experienced in a crucial part of your discovery period that it wouldve hurt a lot? maybe even to the point where it surpressed how you felt about yourself? All i want from the trans community is to not let anyone else feel that way. I truly do fear for young trans people and how this exclusive environment stunts them.

#talkin.555 #trans #ftm #if anybody has anything to say about anything i brought up lmk id be happy to address it fr #and also fyi i am a binary trans man #i Found trans people and was like woah wtf thats a thing 👀👀👀 when i was 11 in 2012 for context of what im tallembout when i say the trans #spaces online have gotten more critical since ive been involved #this prolly #isnt thst comprehensible because i started trxting my dad for the first time in a year partway thru #im #bout to jusy #b scrolling degular now because that was a lot but i just want the brst for #other trans kids #whomped tags

[wild-at-mind]

TW internalised misogyny, internalised biphobia, self loathing

I remember a time on tumblr when people other than gender critical variety TERFs used the phrase ‘identify out of womanhood’, believe it or not, that was a thing said by decent people once. Anyway the reason I identified out of womanhood, or am currently trying to at least, was nothing at all to do with me thinking being a woman is bad. It was being a bi woman, specifically a bi woman who has never and will never date a woman due to already being committed to a man, that was the hardest thing for me. This isn’t about lesbians vs bi women at all, I won’t have any of that. It is about ‘people who understand why acknowledging that they are into women matters to bi women dating men, and people that don’t’. (Acknowledging could mean: expecting to be treated like someone with a stake in wlw matters even if they are dating a man, or just using their identity to describe themselves openly, or many other things.) I mostly encounter these things online, often in places that pretend to be supportive of ALL bi women, which is what makes it so painful I think. The stereotype is that the bi woman will bring her horrible, misogynistic boyfriend into queer spaces. She will predate her fellow wlw for threesomes. You’ve heard these ones. She probably is not even bi, really, she kissed a girl at a party maybe, every straight girl does that, why she decided suddenly it was important enough to her to form an identity around you have no idea. The fact that she and her boyfriend may talk together about women they find attractive is very offputting to you, almost despicable, and infinitely more disgusting than the prospect of a man finding a woman attractive just on his own. Because that’s to be expected, no, but a bi woman should know better than to indulge a man in that sort of thing!

A community that well recognises the importance of belonging suddenly seems to forget when they ask, well why does a bi women with a boyfriend need this kind of space anyway? Your relationship doesn’t define your sexuality but also bi women with boyfriends go in the special category of ‘least concern’, can leave whenever they want, and do. Your sexual history doesn’t define your sexuality, but here’s a list of famous people who we have deemed bisexual based on the list of people they are known to have slept with, regardless of what they actually identified themselves as. Are you looking for community, for history, well don’t you know bi women of every life experience have historically always been treated exactly the same as lesbians? Yes, you who have dealt with repression of your sexuality that caused you to entirely miss out on the opportunity to perhaps date women in the 2000s and 2010s, if you had been around half a century ago you would for sure have been brave enough to date women and join gay scenes! (Anyone who doesn’t find this generalisation comforting will be treated with slight suspician.) Add to that the general suspician any woman into women faces when she dares express sexual feelings towards women that are purely about sex. And that’s a lot. I don’t want any of this baggage. I couldn’t think of any other way to escape it and I feel so much better without it. There were other reasons, of course, but given that for a while on tumblr there was a whole ‘lesbians can essentially undergo a full physical transition and still maintain their essential connection to womanhood through their fierce and dedicated love of women! (info on bisexuals not found)’ movement, it’s no wonder I got a little confused. Who will connect me to womanhood?

You may feel that my problems could be solved by spending more time in irl bi spaces. Thanks for your concern, but I do (or at least I did, before covid). In fact all this baggage was actually hindering me in those spaces- meeting people who have roughly similar experiences to you is great, but it’s not fair to expect new people I meet to suddenly become my confidiant and take on the responsibility for making me feel accepted in LGBT spaces, even specifically bi+ spaces. I would love to socialise without carrying that baggage.

(Sorry if this is upsetting to anyone, I may delete it later, I don’t know. It’s just how I feel and have felt.)

#bisexual #bi woman #bisexuality #nonbinary #depression daze #i'm really sad #self loathing #there are other reasons i've been IDing as nonbinary that are positive #this post isn't about those

[maraquanwocky]

LOOKS LIKE I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE MYSELF

questions by teufortvr

How’d you find out about HLVRAI? my friend kitty linked me this moment and like five seconds in i decided “Ah yes. I must now watch this Entire Series.”

Who’s your favorite character and why? basic bitch answer: coomer, for his genuinely excellent one-liners and character arc big brain answer: gman coolatta, for being the g-man but also an enormous dork

Who do you relate to most in the series? tommy and benrey, for the nigh-incomprehensible rambling speech

What font do you use most? hlvrai: finurlig, probably in general: i use notepad a lot so i use consolas the most by default

Favorite Scene? “There’s nothing more refreshing than a nice dip through Sewage Waste Water.”

Favorite Act? act 4 is the best but nothing will ever compare to the feeling i had watching act 1 for the first time

Favorite Line? youtube videos: “Yes...YEEES! ...Is it working-- YEEEEEESS!” OR “Taste it! Gordon, taste it! Please! Taste it, Gordon! Please!” streams: “Weekeepidia. The online, Free encyclopedia that Anyone can edit...Missster Freeman.”

Favorite Beverage? mug’s root beer

Favorite Song (PASSPORT GUARDIAN, Dr.Coomer’s Bumpin Mix)? we can use these for MY-- CLONES-- ..........Hello Gordon!

Do you have a favorite headcanon or trope about any of the characters? i know its p much canon benrey was just licking the corpses but the first time i watched the series i thought he was eating them and i refuse to let go of that interpretation also the gman being an awkward but extremely loving father and tommy responding to the affection like its all normal while everyone else is looking on like “thats a hug???” also the gman being nice to benrey because he treats tommy like the adult he is

Have you watched any other series similar to HLVRAI (Gorgeous Freeman, Freeman’s mind)? i finished freeman’s mind 1 a few days ago and absolutely loved it. gordon’s ‘modern major general’ should be selected by the united states library of congress for preservation in the national film registry as being  "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"

Do you drink soda? yes and i wish i could drink more

Do you think aliens exist? outside our solar system, absolutely. inside? There’s nothing there.

What toppings do you like on your pizza? extra cheese and extra pepperoni. buffalo chicken if im at a cici’s

What weapon would you use in a alien invasion? i know nothing about half-life weapons but fallout 4 revolver cool,,

If you could be in any video game, which one would you be in? the elder scrolls online but you have to add in a no death mode

If you could memorize any Wikipedia page by heart, which one? Of the many eruptions of Mount Vesuvius in Italy, the most famous is the eruption in 79 AD. This eruption is one of the deadliest in European history.

What’s your favorite video game right now? i havent been playing the Bideo Gayme at all lately but ive been craving some fallout 4 this past week

Have you played any of the Half Life games? i played like twenty minutes of half-life 1 and absolutely loved it but then a computer fell on me after i crawled through a hole in the wall and i screamed irl and never opened the game again

Do you watch any of the gang (Wayne, Holly, Gir, etc.)? ive been going through wayneradiotv ON DEMAND and have enjoyed almost every stream ive seen. im currently watching his alyx playthrough

If they make a second one, what is one thing you want to happen in it? i know next to nothing about half-life 2 and its episodes but i wanna see how gman coolatta would react to being grabbed by the vortigaunts

What do you think is inside G-man’s suitcase? its hammer space contained within a bag of holding and thus is capable of holding an infinite number of items but somehow its still about 50% tommy-related items; from family photos to his old drawings to like..weighted blankets to soothe him

Is Chuck E. Cheese a restaurant or a entertainment center? people do not go for the rat’s pizza alone. they go for the arcade and cheap-ass prizes. it is a Family Entertainment Center™

#hlvrai

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

It’s time for a milestone post—my 23,000th post to be precise. It’s been almost a year to the day since I hit 22,000 posts, which is by far the longest I’ve ever taken to hit another round number. After all, I hit 10,000 less than a year after diving into the blue hole.

In fact, the changes in my online habits are were so interesting to me that I went ahead and recorded the date and post-count of every past milestone that I could find. Plotting the data confirms my impressions.

The sharp drop-off around the 10,000 post mark is both because that’s around the time I realized how seriously I’d fucked up my first round of university, and because there’s a large gap where I didn’t record post numbers very well. Oops.

There’s a number of factors behind the ongoing taper. I could attribute it to reduced interest, but that’s a non-answer. For one thing, I still don’t think my actual usage time is down that much (though of course, I don’t have historical data to back me up on that one). What’s actually going on is a bit more complicated.

For instance, I’ve made some friends through the local rationalist meetup who rival anyone I’ve had in meatspace since....honestly, I have no idea. Hanging out with like-minded adults several times a week is pretty great. I’ve also gotten my parents attending more Mensa events (many of the regulars have known me since the baby shower), and of course I’m back in school so I’m talking to other grad students on a regular basis. My offline social life might literally have never been better. A low bar, I know.

Additionally, I’m feeling the weight of certain responsibilities honestly just a touch more, which makes me wary of the whole bottomless pit of infinite scroll. (Okay, actually, I keep my dash is short enough that I could finish it in a few minutes most days, which is kind of the issue: I go looking for additional content on blogs i don’t follow.)

More importantly, though, as my body starts showing signs of senescence—I found my first gray hair back in November, did I tell y’all about that?—I’ve been increasingly cognizant of mortality and my limited time on Terra. Or off it, should those dreams ever play out. I’ve been subtly aware of how online escapism is actually in opposition to achieving my dreams because it placates the ambition centers of my mind. Of course, there’s also avoidance behavior at play; my fanfiction consumption dropped from lots to zero in the first week of winter break. I was on short-form social media so much after that because I got sick.

The big thing is that I’m interacting less and less. I don’t know if this is a good thing. I’m not getting into internet slapfights and interminable debates nearly as often, but I’m also not developing any new friendships. The last time I developed a lasting new relationship online was...2015? 2016? Certainly not in the last two years, even though I definitely have the Dunbar slots available. (I think.)

Where do I go from here? I don’t know. I’m not sure what I want the future of my online presence to look like. I’m not really sure what “what an online presence looks like” really means, for that matter. I get a lot of good entertainment, information, and insight from online spaces, Tumblr especially, but I don’t seem to be saying as much anymore.

Maybe it’s a matter of experienced hands burning out. I’m still in the process of synthesizing and integrating a lot of ideas right now, which means I see a lot of posts that I can tell are wrong, but where I couldn’t explain the wrongness of in a rhetorically concise or compelling manner. I’d rather just write a book, but feedback is extremely important for shoring up the weaknesses in an argument or conceptual structure, so really I do need to be talking to people if I want to make progress. My meatspace circle is better at that than ever but probably not enough to get where I want to go.

Which questions do I want to tackle? Which activities are worth my limited time? What goals do I want to pursue in the near-, mid-, and long-term? I’m still trying to figure that out. I don’t know who I want my off- and online role models to be (and how much overlap I want between those two groups).

Maybe talking about it would help.

#milestone post #23000th post

[dramarising-replacement]

get madder :^)

hey yall remember that post where i gave a 1-or-2 sentence comment about each fanart that got featured in the community update? many people promptly took their panties and corkscrewed them directly up their very touchy buttholes, so i thought it'd be fun to do a follow-up :^)

>everyone who just said "lol bad post u suck ur opinion SUX"

it's my opinion lol deal w it

>it’s kinda cute how you think we would care about this / nobody cares

clearly u do bc ur mad fam!!! hahaha rekd got u!!1!

>perhaps… perhaps art is subjective and they wanted to make some community members happy by featuring them?

they couldve picked a little better was my only point

>"It’s people like this who give new artists anxiety for posting stuff online" / everything about how mean i am bc it will make newb artists feel nerbous :'(

hey guess what! it's the internet where literally everyone can see and say whatever they want. that's the risk ya fuckin take when u post online :^) waahhh

>"It’s called a personal art style"

its common knowledge by now but "its muh style" is not an excuse and yeah its subjective but also sometimes aspects of a pic are just bad

>"how does desnik only get a 5/10 lmao. Amazing shading, a super unique and difficult perspective that brings life to the whole piece? Ye nah that’s shit, apparently."

i said the shading (painting) was pretty good, and they lose points bc "bringing it to life" with a weird pose only works if the anatomy and perspective (which i specified) isnt so off that it takes away from the entire piece pretty significantly, which imo it does. also that pose isnt unique i can find u 10 pics of furries in that exact pose on like the front page of furaffinity or wherever. also i didnt say it was shit LOL

>"“this is anime uwu garbage” is not criticism OP"

fuck yeah it is, you ever been to the front page of deviantart? i assumed the implied "stop using super stylized shitty anime pics as a reference bc ur overall "style" is severely and obviously suffering for it" was kinda evident but i guess not

>"why the fuck do people get so butthurt when someone says their art is bad"

dude THANK you i mean i was expecting pretty severe backlash but i was as least expecting more creativity than literally just "bad post op" 20 times. tho i DID see enough to make this post i guess? this blog is fun but like in a painful way

> “not to be rude to the featured artists, good on them” pick a tone and stick with it

sorry man i really just do have a rude-sounding speaking (,,typing) voice and i dont mean any bad feelings towards these artists, my literal only point is that that one pic has some problems and maybe staff had some better pics to spotlight instead (and i don't even mean that for all of them. top, middle, and bottom left were all good choices and so was desnik's tbh. but i figured id ""review"" them too cuz they were there) i usually even pointed out something i liked about it? but i gotta move fast here cmon 100 character limit

>"dude… do you even know what a sketch is? because that’s in no way a sketch"

what do YOU define as a sketch? i guess the snapper one could also be lineart but its in 2 midtones (which people do when theyre "sketching" out values) and they used a messy brush so my mind went to sketch. and the coatl one looks like they did it really fast and slapped some flat colors on it. actually my point was literally that it looks like they did it fast, like a sketch rather than a lineart

>"at least put in some effort in writing a couple of sentences on each drawing on what, why, and how to improve the drawings. Seeing that some of the art is clearly from amateur artists, some words of advice would at least be helpful here."

yeah u right they definitely deserve better. but i was going fast cuz i just have an affinity for short snappy reviews i guess. like i tried to do cliffnotes, just "this part is good but this part is bad" and then a meaningless number score cuz i aint even addressing this to them, i posted it to a drama blog to complain about staff basically 

>the nocturne guy who wrote a lot

alright cool. you totally have gotten a lot better. i never meant to discourage you for drawing in the first place. incidentally i said u had potential bc u were obviously a new artist, but like u were OBVIOUSLY a new artist with a loose understanding of depth and shading and stuff, and again this is a front page spotlight yadda yadda. ill fuckin hit u with a review right now:

you clearly understand shading and anatomy way better, and that coatl actually looks pretty fuckin good. the lineart is more consistent, it's framed way better, the proportions are WAY better, and it's really clean and stylized. the shading is infinitely more convincingly shiny and reflective. from here, imo you could benefit from going further with shading (darker, more dynamic, leaving little to no flat spaces like the crest fluff and tongue), and maybe polishing the lineart a little more too, like coloring/highlighting it and really pushing/polishing the linewidth (there are tutorials for that). overall that coatl is v cute, keep on pushing poses & shading

>"i bet OPs art sucks ass"

fIT e ME IrL

anyway thanks 4 reading my fucking essay and i'm super high. if you read al lof this then shame on you

#Drama #Praise #Flight Rising #Cursing #Sarcasm #Art #Long post #Petty #submission

[adorabledonutunicorn]

Dealing with Depression

International lifelines: http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html 

Resources in he US and things I’ve used:

Crisis Text Line: https://www.crisistextline.org/ 

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 or https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/talk-to-someone-now/ 

Wysa (also an app): https://www.wysa.io/ 

7cupsoftea (also now an app): https://www.7cups.com/ 

Stop, breathe, and think: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.stopbreathethink.app or https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stop-breathe-think/id778848692?mt=8 

BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com/ 

No one is probably going to see this lol, but just in case someone does, I’ll put this out there. I am by no means an expert or completely better, and what has worked for me so far may not work for you, but hopefully the few things I have to say is still helpful.

So, last year was by far the hardest to get through. From about Late April to probably mid-September I was at my lowest, often dealing with suicidal thoughts and ideations. I would also like to point out a few informational things: Am I clinically diagnosed with depression? No. Am I depressed? Yes, and I might also have social anxiety. Do I take medication? Yes. Do I have a psychiatrist? Yes. Do I go to therapy? Yes. Am I judgmental about anyone with mental illness? Absolutely not.

First and foremost, I encourage you to seek help and reach out. I know it is NOT AT ALL EASY, and it hurts that I say those stereotypical words because I know it’s easier said than done. But I care, so I encourage you to reach out in any means whether it be to a trusted human, doggo or pupper, teddy bear (I mean...your teddy will listen, not judge you, and give you hugs), crisis center, or hotline. If I’m being quite honest, it took me more than a year to reach out because I realized I was not okay. But the first and most important person I told, is one of the main reasons why I am still here. I could be all dramatic and be like “she saved my life” and that would not be a lie, but what’s more true is that she has provided me with a safe space emotionally and physically, support, encouragement, and resources. I’m sure it also helped that she works in the mental health field but hey, I am extremely lucky to have her in my life either way.

On some of the hardest most overwhelming days, her and her husband were kind enough to let me stay overnight with them. They also just let me hang out and watch Netflix when I really need to get away. I’ve never really had such a close deep friendship with anyone before them, but let me tell you, it feels good to be loved and cared for. They are like my new and improved family (I mean, they are a lot older than me too). I’ve known what it’s like to feel desperately alone and like no one cares, but there ARE people out there who do. I would say you should go out there and find them but ummm, it almost feels like those friends came to me hahaha. I guess “finding” in this context moreso means that if they aren’t a part of your present, they WILL be a part of your future.

Those also aren’t the only friends I’ve told. I happen to have a few friends irl and online *wow, I have friends?* and it took all the guts in my compromised digestive system to tell them. Just having people around me who know, won’t judge, and are there feels like an extra cushion. I can’t have only one other person carry my burdens, the load becomes lighter with more people. And obviously we’re not gonna have an infinite amount of people we trust enough to reveal such a seemingly dark part of our life with, but if you have more than one person, reach out. Take it one step at a time and you will eventually get there.

Even after telling the first person about my struggles, it took months to get further help. Eventually I reached out to the University’s Counseling Center—yes, I know I am lucky to have had all these resources available to me...for the low low cost of my tuition and fees. Ok but seriously though I really am lucky—and I met with a counselor for some amount of weeks who was not a good fit for me, and transitioned to group therapy. I can go more into detail some other time, but it has been helpful to have people I am accountable to and connect with.

This past September I was able to start antidepressants thanks to my friend who literally called in for me to make sure it would actually happen. Even still, I just started noticing that I’ve been improving and it’s taken me from August until now to feel marginally functional. Now that I say that I could slip back tomorrow but you know, that’s how it goes. Healing is NOT a linear positive function. And who is to say I won’t struggle with this for the rest of my life? It may be depressing (oh what a terrible pun) but that’s depression for ya. Some other things I started doing to help include occasional social media detoxes, writing letters, journals, or probably-extremely-bad poems, following and reading blogs from AFSP and TWLOHA, prioritizing sleep, trying to not stay in my room all day, being patient with myself, writing a list of things to live for, and practicing gratitude. The first few are pretty self-explanatory, but I found prioritizing sleep a good start to self-care. I might prioritize it a little too much sometimes lol but I need more sleep than the average person. If you’re depressed, then you probably do too. And on top of that, going outside and seeing the sun or clouds or whatever your most common weather is, is important. It forces me to try not to isolate myself and stay in my black hole of a room all day. Even on days where I don’t want to get out of bed, I somehow do because I’m apparently a pretty high-functioning person and/or my stomach makes me sometimes. That might not be the case for you but that’s okay because sometimes you just need to be patient with yourself. There are some days where leaving your bed is an accomplishment. And believe me when I say it IS an accomplishment. No one said staying alive is easy. Somehow my body maintains homeostasis minus serotonin and probably other hormones, but if you’re heart is beating, you’re alive. It might hurt to be aware of that fact, but I hope you can take it as a sign. A sign that there are things at work you can’t control, and these things are trying to tell you to stay alive. You are more than your thoughts, and your reality is more than the lies in your head. And I guess this kind of leads into reasons to be alive and gratitude. It probably sounds dumb in theory, but making a list of all the reasons to stay alive has reminded me of all the things I am so grateful to have. Personally, this list mostly involves people in my life...but hey these people are the best humans I know. Some of them have depression too and that doesn’t make them any less great. In fact, their stories give me hope which is incredibly important. Let me say that louder for the people in the back, HOPE IS IMPORTANT. Hopelessness feeds depression, and while sometimes you might be able to stumble upon something that gives you temporary hope, the real hope that sends out a life ring when you need it most has to be created. In other words you need to put in the effort to find a light that won’t fade away. But spoiler alert, that’s not easy either and I can’t tell you how or where to find that. For me, what helps is gratitude. It helps me be present in the moment, observe my surroundings, and notice that I have many things to be thankful for. Sometimes it’s the sun on a cold day, sometimes the calm snow at night, yummy food in my dorm, or small moments of seeing someone being kind to someone else. When you are grateful the small things, they really start to matter. It’s like saving pennies, it adds up. For me, seeing the seasons change can be quite beautiful, so I should stay alive to see my own seasons change too. The weather might not always be desirable, but if you look in the right direction, you might see a rainbow—or even a double rainbow all the way across the sky. So I hope you decide to stay, to live another day, and find something worth living for. For my last thought which is kind of unrelated but I still wanna put it here...You might not be like me and like simplicity and silence, but sometimes I get the most fulfilling feelings when no one is around, it’s quiet, and I just listen ;) .

#dealing with depression #depression #hope #suicide prevention #depression tips #Suicide is never the answer #you are beautiful #you are loved #you are irreplaceable

[reportccs]

What Is Post-Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement

The key to understanding what "post-Internet" means is that, despite how it sounds, it doesn't suggest that the seismic technological developments associated with the Net are finished and behind us. Far from it.

Instead, in the same way that postmodern artists absorbed and adapted the strategies of modernism—fracturing the picture plane, abstraction, etc.—for a new aesthetic era, post-Internet artists have moved beyond making work dependent on the novelty of the Web to using its tools to tackle other subjects. And while earlier Net artists often made works that existed exclusively online, the post-Internet generation (many of whom have been plugged into the Web since they could walk) frequently uses digital strategies to create objects that exist in the real world.

There are already a handful of artists and galleries that are closely linked to post-Internet art, and curators are aiming to sum up the way these artists reflects our new relationship to images and objects inspired by the infinitely variable culture of the Web.  What follows is a summary of some of the major figures associated with the emerging world of post-Internet art.

Artie Vierkant's 2010 essay "The Image Object Post-Internet" sparked much of the recent conversation surrounding art after the Internet. In it, Vierkant, an artist himself, surveys the way we engage with images in the post-Internet era, when they can be shared, reproduced, altered, and distributed more easily than ever before in human history. His argument is that in the pre-Internet days, it was difficult to effectively reproduce an artwork because the photographic, scanning, display, and printing technologies we have now simply didn't exist yet; now, the opposite is true. To highlight this shift, Vierkant refers to his own work—Technicolor sculptural pieces he makes with photographic means—as "Image Objects," referring to their ephemeral and infinitely reproducible nature. Vierkant's essay is preceded by a number of other projects that, themselves, range widely in content, form, and style. The influential blog The New Aesthetic, run since May 2011 by writer and artist James Bridle, is a pioneering institution in the post-Internet movement. The blog's heady take on online visual culture, imagined as a view of the contemporary from a robot's perspective (a conceit that is quickly becoming more akin to reality than science fiction), has led to a slew of responses, both online and "IRL" (as they say), including a panel discussion at the SXSWin 2012 and the book New Aesthetic, New Anxieties, a critical response to the discussion around the movement. Much of the energy around the New Aesthetic seems, now, to have filtered over into the "post-Internet" conversation.

Another artist associated with the post-Internet label, Oliver Laric makes work concerned with the Internet-wrought phenomenon of collective authorship and the effacement of the distinction between the real and the fake. In his videos and image-based pieces, Laric displays material he finds online as his own work and invites others to remix, reuse, and re-present it via YouTube and other online channels. Like Vierkant, Laric's work also extends to discursive projects: he used to run the highly influential website VVORK (with fellow artists Aleksandra Domanovic, Christoph Priglinger, and Georg Schnitzer), which set examples of recent artwork in one-to-one comparisons with historical pieces, all sourced online. 

While writers, bloggers, critics, and curators attempt to get a handle on post-Internet art, artist keep trucking along, doing their own thing both online and off. Los Angeles-based Petra Cortright is representative of the many artists who make work specifically for online formats, creating animated GIFs, YouTube videos, and labyrinthine web pages that, in combination, present her compelling take on the newest aesthetic trends—while also somehow managing to treat current visual culture with nostalgia, emblematic of the Net age's constantly-updating, blink-and-you'll-miss-it progressions. Other Web-based projects that investigate how images operate online include Jon Rafman's popular Tumblr project 9 Eyes, for which the artist spends hours sifting "step-by-step" through Google's Street View function to find surprising, resonant, or simply beautiful stills that have accidentally been captured by the Google car's 9-lens, 360-degree camera.

Of course, both Cortright and Rafman also produce real-world artworks, objects that can be hung on the wall or placed on a plinth in a gallery; the most counterintuitive aspect of the post-Internet label is that it extends to work in the traditional formats of painting and sculpture. In fact, one of the features that distinguishes post-Interent art from the "Net Art" of the late '90s and early 2000s is its ability to crossover between online and offline formats. While Net Art refers to art that uses the Internet as its medium and cannot be experienced any other way, post-Internet art makes the leap from the screen into brick-and-mortar galleries.

ART AFTER "NET ART"

Seth Price's Double Hunt, 2007, a replica of a cave painting from the famous Lascaux caves in France screen printed onto a sheet of PVC

Seth Price, for example, is a post-Internet artist whose inkjet prints, vacuum-formed assemblages on high-impact polystyrene, and multiple iterations of the 'same' artwork with only slight variations question the status of objects within 21st-century media's distribution systems. Price has also attempted to manifest the viewing experience of YouTube in real gallery space, as in his 2011 show at New York's Petzel Gallery, where he installed his videos on monitors within individual viewing booths with video playback controlled by the viewer—harkening back to the viewing devices of the early days of cinema and the return to solitary viewership that the internet has brought on.

Cory Arcangel might be the best-known artist associated with post-Internet art that physicalizes immaterial digital structures—and he's certainly the only one to have had a solo exhibition at the Whitney at the age of 33. Arcangel is celebrated for his modifications of popular video games, a series of which were on view in that show; he also reuses appropriated gradient patterns from Photoshop, YouTube videos, and other bits of digital pop culture to craft prints, drawings, musical compositions, videos, and performance works. The transmutation of art that's based on the Internet from online-only platforms to materializations in real life leads to an interesting question: what will this work look like 100 years from now, when the technologies that these artists are using, commenting on, and imitating either no longer exist or have been radically transformed? Only time will tell. Post-Internet art is distinctly of the now; and that quality, so far, is its most definitive feature.

[yourtabong-blog]

Avakin Life – 3D virtual world

 Avakin Life – 3D virtual world

Lockwood Publishing Ltd

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PLAY NOWDownload Avakin Life 3D Virtual World for PC | Avakin Life Updates and Cheats

Breakaway from a restrictive reality and jump into Avakin Life – 3D Virtual World, a world where you can bend or break the rules, with no nagging parents behind your back!

What if we told you that you can escape rules and parents by entering a virtual world that lets you create your own apartment, form online friendships, travel, explore, find a job, and own pets? Sounds too good to be true? Not quite with Avakin Life, though! The best virtual 3D world unblocked games google sites can never beats.

Earn and use avacoins to fund your dream for independence! You start out with about 1,250 avacoins, a free apartment with furniture, and a whopping 150 gems! With your avacoins and premium gems, you can use it to explore Avakin Life’s world. Make your home your own with wallpapers, sofas, tables… Not enough avacoins already? Get a job, or share an apartment with your friends! It’s all about making Avakin world your home-crib with fun decisions to control your Avakin’s life!

Play the Avakin Life PC version right now by downloading the game here on Games.lol!

  Here are some features we love!

Customizing your own avakin (avatar)!

Upon creating an account, you’d get to choose from over 16 avakins! Can’t find one that you actually like in the default page? No worries, you can customize your avakin later in the game – clothing, hairstyles, facial adjustments, the works! Personalize their clothes or the color of their skin and eyes! Make your avakin your own – recreate an avakin that resembles you or someone else, it’s all up to you to design the avakin’s canvas! You can also choose a name for your avakin (don’t put in your full name!), we picked “gracieloufreebie” (add us as a friend?)

Customize your apartment

Put your design visions into virtual reality by recreating the kind of space you want. Yes, the free wallpapers and floor tiles aren’t all that nice, so we went ahead and bought some prettier pieces, at a slightly heftier price. Check out our sweet rose gold wallpaper (wish we had it in real life) and mahogany floor tiles (this cost us 350+ avacoins!). The point here is, make your apartment homey or baloney – it’s all up to you! If you don’t want to stay alone, there are shared apartments too… get your friends and family to join the game and you guys can play with each other in this virtual reality game (as if you don’t see enough of them IRL)! 

Customize everything else

You can customize the appliances, the beds, sofas, tables, music, cars, toilet stuff, and even get your own petkin! If your parents have never allowed you to have a pet romping around in the house, and if they said they probably never will, don’t be too sad. Avakin Life hosts a bunch of really cute dogs, cats, and other pets of many different breeds! Now you can have fun with a pet in your virtual apartment without having to worry about the fur sticking to your bed and clothes, or them wetting your furniture in real life!

Many things to do in the Avakin World!

You can travel, get a job, share an apartment or just hang out with friends or new make ones in social spots! You can shop, or play games. Want to just chill out at your friend’s cozy crib instead of your boring, bare one in the beginning of the game? Sure, just hop over after dropping your friend a message! Get to put your wanderlust desires to work as you travel to special places in the game: Egypt? Check! Unleash your inner adventurer; solve puzzles and open chests to get avacoins, or other interesting things! 

Have fun in Avakin Life, let loose!

You can apply for jobs in the hottest parts of town, or just hang out at a dance club with cool music! Why not hit the club and hang out by the pool as the sun sets in the background? This is a very chill map, and people don’t get pressured! Sit down in the club as you go to the toilet IRL – you can continue letting your avakin do whatever they want in the background as you do other things. You don’t have to complete missions or timed challenges, it’s simply a world for you to relax and let loose! Try out dance moves, chat with other avakins… basically, just have fun!

Avakin Life Tips and Tricks

How to level up faster in Avakin Life

Chat up a storm: Chat to as many people as you can and you’ll start raking in the points! It’s important you don’t just chat to the same few people every time you log in. Talk to other people. The more friends you have and the chattier you are, the faster it is to level up!

Rate Apartments: Rate people’s created apartments (there are so many) in order to get more points. The thousands of community-created apartments are fun to look at, and can act as inspiration for your own house!

Feed/Care for Pets: Feeding and making sure your pet is well taken care of is important!

Gifting other users: Generosity pays in this game! Literally!

Be involved in the community: Actively visit social spots, dance and chat with people, etc and you’ll be well on your way to being more popular… Generate social momentum!

Do interesting activities, or travel: Travel to Egypt or dive in the sea – repeatedly doing interesting things and activities will help you get lots of experience points!

Look out for Events: There are special events that Avakin Life introduce to players like the upcoming Mermaid one (22 July 2018 to 29 July 2018). A beautiful mermaid without a name is visiting the shores of avakin world! If you find her within the game, she’ll give you special gifts! Who knows what they’ll contain? Probably stuff worth more than things you can find on land. 

How to get more coins

Sign in daily for the daily rewards, visit your apartment at least once a day, and leveling up! Watching videos and advertisements will also help you land some coins. Generally, these coins are quite easy to get.

Don’t be rude to people in Avakin Life

It’s a dangerous game if your mannerisms in the game are down in the dumps. If you are exceedingly rude to others, they can report you. Receiving six negative reports will cause you to be banned from the game, and then all your hard work in getting coins, sprucing up your apartment and grooming your pet… will be gone! Not even Avakin Life cheats will save you from the ban.

Contrastingly, if you do encounter a member that is constantly harrassing you to the point where they even create alt accounts to nag you, don’t be afraid to contact the Avakin Life support.

Get a Job

This is the most effective way to earn Avakin Life money. You can get a part-time job as a barista or bartender, in 23rd Street Cafe or Club Sundown. Once you’ve gotten the job, you need to learn how to fulfil orders placed by customers who pay with avacoins or gems. Upon each completed order, you can earn “avabucks” and experience points! What to do with the avabucks? Exchange them with the ATM machine that is easily found in both the work locations!

Outside the game, never look at 3rd party programs

Games.lol is here to remind you that beyond our tips and tricks, there exists several websites that offer any Avakin Life hack or mod. We highly advise you to back away from these sites because these are potentially harmful to your computer and to your personal data. They may say they’ll give you infinite Avakin Life coins but in reality, it’s all just a big hoax.

Sounds like a fun escape from the real world, yet?

Get your Avakin Life download on PC today! Or hit us up here for more games like My Tamagotchi Forever and Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire!

Down load here: https://games.lol/avakin-life-3d-virtual-world/

#games #android

[welcometomy20s]

April 27, 2019

Ideological division in cyberspace

This is a response to frenzied stasis, which gets into a heart of my thoughts regarding how ‘meat’ division give away to ideological spaces in the internet.

Examples which alex gives is interesting, for example the argument over the idea of ‘inclusion’, which ostensibly portrays as argument regarding diversity, ultimately turns into arguments of exclusion, where the adherents rail regard the various causes which the organization seem to seek, and seek to almost punish those who do not devote to that cause, of course one of the causes being not punishing someone, therefore accusation of punishment will lead to further punishment as to not follow the cause of not punishing someone. 

This ideological collation present of the object of adherence with a devotive component. In the olden days, if there was a community of groups forming around, a say a video game, there would be many different perspective on that video game. Perhaps one might a budding developer who is interested in the game’s mechanics, one might enjoy the characters and storyline and compares to one’s other interest in similar narratives, meanwhile one might enjoy the social nature, the implication and the zeitgeist that the game being, while another might personally dislike the game, but is fascinated by its structure and complexity. 

Online, however, this group cannot be formed, because there’s no physical reality to which the object is placed. To keep an idea real, one must be devoted to the properties of such object. The game needs to become their guiding soul, their life’s devotion. We’re all monks apparently and zealous ones at that.

There’s no nuance of better or worse, but merely the good and the bad. The gradient of interest sharpens to a regions of light and darkness, and the harsh line that divides them, even though they are still pretty arbitrary. In the before days, criticism would enforce the community, as the problem will bring people to make the game better. People criticized the military in the old days, because people wanted a better military, more efficient and effective military. Now military is an signifier of an signifier. The concept is far detached from anyone else.

alex goes onto implictly mention the xkcd 1095 ‘Crazy Straw’ which posit that  “Human subcultures are nested fractally. There's no bottom.” It also hearkens back to the original definition of intersectionality where the combination of identities present a unique challenge than ones with either (xor) identities, and therefore forming organization with those concerns in mind creates an organizations for every combination of identities, which through devotive nature of internet communities becomes entrenched from one another, further fueling the atomization of late capitalism, since not many people will have the exact combination of identities, especially if one contain several minority identities.

alex also point out how the infinite nature of internet makes the idea of safe spaces maligned, since one builds a need for ‘safe space’, even when one enters a self space, one is almost incentivized to create a safe space within that safe space, which is possible since one can create a website with little time or resource... which further fuels this fractalization and atomization.

And since there’s low but real barrier to the internet, majority of the people spending the most time would be middle class white males, which mean they would be most shielded from this type of atomization, therefore further entrenching the oppression of minorities, which opposes the initial intention.

In the ‘meat’ world, you can handle being with strangers because the interaction is small (perhaps during a commute or shopping) and most of time you will be with people that know you. You are going from one established safe space to another. (Of course, there’s the exceptions, but that’s further illustrate the tragedy.) In the internet, you are always with strangers. You can try to work with people that you know, but social media revolution means that most of the time you are spending on forums, akin the original, a large public gathering space.

You can create a safe space, yes, but that space is never safe. War is almost inevitable and you become shell-shocked. There’s a reason PTSD was identified broadly, it’s precisely the term of the exceptions in the previous paragraph. Instead, almost everyone on the internet has it. Everyone is at war on the web.

alex goes on talk about technosocial capital, again emphasizing on the technical competency and the social competency, which is intricately combined. It’s all about buzzword and clickbait, mechanics that gains you attention. Ideas of personal emotion and introspection is given away to branding and presentation.

Going from thoughts to words, thoughts are fleeting and soft, but words are harder and more permanent, therefore ironically more manipulative. A group can withhold the technology of literacy, famously done in the American South, but ubiquitous all across the world. One collect the permanent words, the ease of access make it so that thoughts become a true resource. Information is theoretically free, but even though you do have the world’s information in the fingertips, can you get it? Successfully wading through the mountains of data is itself a form of capital, which leads to accumulation and massive inequality.

That’s why torrenting is scary, not because movies are inherent valuable, but the distribution of media shifts the capital from theater owners to hackers. And this is true capital, monetized capital. Decentralization of that social capital did not lead to an utopia, one of organized, self-similar structure, reinforcing each other, but one of destructive chaos, where smallest of communities are continuing fighting in order them to even exist, and large communities can wipe out several small ones, which splinter and then fight among oneself. One anti-heads to the truth.

alex points out that disavowal of these process doesn’t not free from our deeds, because presumption of disavowal precisely relies on the purity of the spirit, that one believes in justice, that one is just, even though their behavior may say otherwise. By spending in the land of belief, one forget behavior also exists.

alex point how emotions are also traded as commodity, while I would further present that community are bonded mainly through the common affect, one I have called ‘We are Struggling Together’. alex continues to point how the this mechanism itself present the road to totalitarianism. Like general relativity, the stage is also the player, and in fact is the major player. Within the stage, you might process to go against the stage, but you have to work with the stage regardless of your preferred direction. Mark Fisher, alex notes, called it Capitalist Realism. The fact any alternative to capitalism doesn’t even cohere anymore.

alex stresses she’s not trying to condemn, which will present a self-defeating purpose, but stresses that we must think outside of that construct. alex stress that there’s beauty in cyberspace, there’s always an way out in the internet. And we know that the physical world has its own problems too. So, what now?

Internet was created with scientist in mind. Scientist, maybe not after the social revolution, are intimately concerned with the meat space. They implicitly practice the world outside of the web through their job. We feel the world around us, we walk the room, present with people... Like we humans and machines, the connection is best made through the combination of cyber and physical. Cyberspace present a new ideological community, which by being realized in the real world, through meetup, conventions, eSports, concert/gig/shows, and through personal meetings, becomes ground in the real world. Online friend are shakey concept at best, we all know online friends are IRL friends in waiting.

Beside the world wide web was created in that proto-realized space, CERN is a realized space of people obsessed in physics, where several billion dollar structures are etched into reality by the minds of several thousand people. We must infuse reality into the internet and bring connectivity to the real world.

Overall, a wonderful article, and a great read. Takes words out of my mouth.

#youtube culture #society #media #internet #identity