Paladin of Cats

i think what’s kind of nightmarish to see about the like endless iterations of horrible discourse about like completely meaningless shit like “are bi people allowed to say the phrase ‘i’m gay’ or is it problematic and evil” is that i dunno how everybody else felt at the time but when like this whole fuckin internet social justice thing was new my hope was that all these discussions would be like, a basis for people to go on to involve themselves more with like real life organizing and activism or whatever instead of like, the whole thing just ossifying into a permanent fixture of social media that a lot of the time consists entirely of people with extremely little life experience arguing with each other in often deeply hostile and bad faith manners solely for the sake of arguing or feeling morally superior.

like it’s just incredible to think about the amount of like strong emotional investment and anger and like righteous outrage and fury and obsession and intensity that goes into like arguments about whether or not somebody should be ostracized for calling themselves pansexual yet still saying the phrase “im gay lol” in a discord group chat at 4 AM, like the realization dawns on me that a lot of this stuff was never even intended to be even remotely related to like activism and politics and collective struggle or anything like that, it might use the language of politics but its social function is comparable to people being really into “console wars” in internet forums from 2005.

#new circus same monkeys

this is why you should care about the reddit strike

This is a big concern for the moderators internally too. We've checked our own subs in archive.org to see what is available and will be making steps to make materials available independently of reddit. Archival organizations are working overtime on Reddit right now because they know it might fucking implode soon.

ID: A tweet by Freyja Katra Valentine @FreyaErlings posted at 2:06 PM June 12, 2023. The text says: Watching everyone slowly realize in real time that reddit being down means a major source of practical knowledge and advice that is searchable on the general internet is gone, and so is everything that reddit had replace. End ID

I mentioned it before but it is very striking to me that as of the last tumblr update, there are now no (0) ways to open someone's desktop blog from a dashboard post. like you can't access the url dot tumblr dot com page at all now unless you already know it exists. imo this seems like a canary that personal blog pages will be gone very shortly, which would suck, since to me that is one of the only good things this site has going for it

Correction: you can still open the top-level URL.tumblr.com link from someone's avatar on the dashboard (so, someone you follow). Actually, I should specify. Here's a post on the dashboard with seven ways to access a post:

So you can access the custom blog, but not a post on a custom blog, despite the plethora of links. Very annoying.

No, here’s the worst part: you can indeed get the link of the post you are clicking on and view it on the person’s custom blog!

IT’S JUST ON THE FUCKING MEATBALL MENU TIMESTAMP INSTEAD FOR SOME REASON I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS SITE

oh my god

Every time I see a post or an article or a YouTube video or what have you that's like "this game was announced all the way back in 2021, and now it's 2023 and it's not out yet – What Went Wrong?" I have to wonder how the author thinks game development works.

The thing that always throws me about Internet history is that YouTube was bought out by Google only eighteen months after it launched, and Google began implementing ads and content filtering less than a year after the acquisition. The initial free-for-all phase of YouTube's existence always feels like it was a lot longer than that – and, like, I was 22 when YouTube first came online, so I don't even have the excuse of the distorted chronology of childhood to account for it!

Based on the notes it's pretty clear that when a lot of folks picture early YouTube they're basically just imagining modern YouTube minus the ads. I guess the "full episodes of fansubbed hentai downsampled to 360p and posted in 2–5 minute chunks" era is something you had to experience first hand to really appreciate it!

yeah, the closest I’ve ever gotten is Vampires in Havana with hard subs, posted in 10-minute chunks

Yeah, ten-minute videos only became a thing a few months before the Google buyout. For the first year or so of YouTube's life the maximum video length was... four minutes, I want to say? Something in that neighbourhood, anyway – I specifically recall folks being excited about the cap being increased to ten minutes because that meant you could post full albums without having to split the longer songs into multiple chunks. Well, unless you were into prog rock, anyway.

My intro to YT was the “full episodes of Soul Eater posted in a smaller square with dubious fansubs” from after the buyout but before copyright moderation really worked. That was my first anime and I watched it entirely on YT.

Remember the ones where folks would circumvent Google's janky first-generation content ID by mirroring the whole video, so if it was hardsubbed you had to learn to read the subs backwards?

Being the person that needs to nap after every big meal is so embarrassing. I apologize for being a 1 week old

Actually you are so right.......

Making the cool fanart my 12 yro self would have wanted to see 🙏

@ my fellow adults who use tumblr a lot:

can you PLEASE put your age in your about/sidebar and make sure it’s accessible on mobile. imo if you’re an adult esp 20+ it’s a little weird that you wouldn’t have your age readily available on your blog. if you’re reading this now and you don’t have your age listed, please rectify that. i feel like teenagers get lured into talking to adults in fandom/lgbt spaces that they may not have intentionally sought out because they think they’re talking to other teenagers, and this can lead to a lot of other – much more insidious –problems

Can you guys step out of the tumblr “everyone over 20 is inherently predatory and creepy towards children” bubble for once and consider that encouraging people to give up their personal information for the imagined safety of the community is like…not safe?

this advice doesn’t even make sense for multiple reasons; if someone is intent on preying upon minors, all they have to do is follow your advice and lie about their age, being over 20 doesn’t mean you can’t be preyed on yourself, you should never be coerced into giving up your privacy on social media (seriously, did a fed write this?), and promoting the idea that turning 20 means your interactions with younger people should be viewed with suspicion is absolutely harmful, like OP do you have any common sense? At all?

“ignore your own privacy boundaries and discomfort and if you don’t idk 🤔sounds a lil sus 2 me, pedophile” will you guys stop larping as conservative politicians for one second please

think-of-the-children fearmongering is not the same thing as actually protecting minors

You’re talking about - much more insidious - problems while telling people if you don’t do what I tell you, you might be a threat to the safety of our community, like okay Dubya!

Let me tell you about the insidious things that happened when I was young in fandom spaces and older fans became my friends

1. I was taught real sex ed by a midwife, including a lot of pros and cons of various birth control

2. I learned you can just get anything printed into a book and having it in a physical book don’t legitimize something

3. I learned how to enjoy other cultures without making people from those cultures uncomfortable

4. I realized my guardians, while better than my past guardians, were still abusive and what I was experiencing was not healthy, even if distressingly common

5. I learned generosity without ulterior motives actually did exist

6. I learned I don’t have to abandon the things I enjoy as I get older.

7. I was taught ways to treat people differently in deference to their age while still treating them as peers.

(they treated me as an equal, but I was not included in any sexual discussions, for example)

8. I learned that friendships don’t have to be quid pro quo

All of these things super insidious and destructive to the conservative agenda.

Destroying the links between generations is part of how the powerful keep us from forming communities and bettering our lives. Don’t do the masters’ work for them.

Categories of people who point at the main character two thirds of the way through a movie and ask "who's that guy":

I realize it’s just because they’re trying to introduce the audience to the concept of Pokemon and everything but nothing will ever be funnier to me than prof oak being like “these are creatures called Pokemon, they live in all sorts of environments!” like imagine if you met a biology professor and they were like ‘I’ve been studying these intriguing creatures called “animals’

I maintain that Pokemon starts to make a lot more sense when you stop thinking of the Professors as biologists and start thinking of them as children’s science communicators, which, in a world where children as young as 10 are expected to make their way in a world populated by superpowered fauna almost entirely alone, stands as an important and laudable career. “There are 150 animals” becomes the in-universe equivalent of “There are three states of matter.” There’s too much information in this field to dump on a grade-schooler all at once, so Professor Oak is here to mete out animal facts as they become relevant in an easy-to-understand way.

That being said, I would love to see what kind of shit the real Pokemon biologists are on. I’m just imagining some disheveled, overcaffienated researcher writing a grant proposal for their study on why certain wingull seem to evolve into pelipper faster when they hatched in the winter or something. There’s bird shit on their glasses. They haven’t left the lighthouse in months. This is their life’s work. Ash Ketchum doesn’t need to know about real Pokémon biology.

Lmfaoooo experts are now saying America has gone past hyperinflation to a new stage they're calling "sonic inflation"

adulthood is just telling yourself “and after i’ve done THAT i can finally relax” with increasing desperation

the ideas that “libido and attraction can be separate and for many aces they are”, “aces who have and enjoy sex are still ace” and “aces who do not have sex and don’t want to shouldn’t be pressured” and “you should accept aces regardless of their sexual behavior” can and should coexist

Owen and Owen and Owen and Owen and Owen finally sit down and have a talk with each other about "Owen."

Another day another instance of misreading tone tags because they use existing acronyms........ /Pieceofshit /handjob

I rewatched movie 7 and thought it was absolutely criminal I couldn't find a single gif of the metagross absolutely ROCKING it in the credits

Okay but this is hands down the best Metagross animation that's ever been made??? Wtf this is incredible

I love you relationship anarchy I love you polyamory I love you queerplatonic relationships I love you unlabeled relationships I love you deep platonic relationships that define themselves I love you deep romantic relationships that define themselves I love you any relationship that defines itself I love you people who love completely and comfortably I love you people learning how to love however comfortable for them I love people I love love

I fucking hate languages.

The Greeks had this word, right, we have no idea where it came from, it just kinda popped up out of nowhere, and it could mean either apples, cheeks, or boobs. Problem is it looked and sounded *exactly* like another, unrelated word which could mean sheep, goat, or any animal in general really, which must have got confusing if you were a farmer talking about your livestock, but anyway…

Then the Romans, having stolen practically everything else from the Greeks, thought they’d nick this word too, because Latin isn’t confusing enough without throwing in a bunch of loan words. And they adopted it to mean a pumpkin.

Then the English came along and were all like “when in Rome”, and stole it, where it became our word ‘melon’. Which has now come back to mean boobs.

How do you like them apples.

I fucking love languages.

In case anyone doubts the veracity of this:

[ source ]

Calling boobs ‘melons’ literally transcends culture, time, and language.

official boob post