due to the realities of the current real estate market, a supervillain who runs their superlair out of one of those rentable co-working spaces

Low budget supervillain just squatting in an abandoned Chipotle.

To keep a low profile they re-open it, but they know nothing about either fast food or Mexican food, they just don’t want Superpants McGee crashing in before they build out their underground bunker to tap into the local infrastructure without getting caught.

So they just hire like, out of work immigrants, anyone really who seems to know Spanish and how to cook. By an outrageous stroke of coincidence, one of his hires knows her way around a kitchen and has an encyclopedic knowledge of her mom’s recipes and spicy peppers. They’re making the best, most flavorful cuisine any Chipotle has every prepared. The supervillian just fakes all the papers for the staff, the whole place is funded by a virus siphoning off stock funds, they’re accidentally running the best Mexican restaurant in town because this villain doesn’t want to be bothered by anyone interrupting their work and does absolutely nothing to interfere with the staff.

Eventually the corporate offices of Chipotle notice the rogue franchise and begin to investigate, filing cease and desist orders, sending threats, until the police start showing up in greater numbers to the point where the staff finally has to go bother their boss, the supervillain. The villain walks out, sees a bunch of cops, and just straight up disintegrates all of them. Everyone has already gone back to work and basically no one saw a dozen cops just get turned to dust, so business as usual.

Unfortunately this triggers a bit of a domino effect, with more and more police showing up, actual hired guns from Chipotle, and in not much longer order private armies belonging to other fast food chains.

At some point, without quite realizing it, the villain has turned something of a corner with their plans for global domination taking a back seat to more important plans to eliminate corporate monopolies controlling food distribution, to provide a safe work environment, and to make the best Mexican food their sleepy little suburb has ever seen.

Superheroes are hard pressed to find an excuse to step in as the most nefarious outcomes seem to be undeserved communities having access to good food and a market reduction in health and safety violations.

Opening narration like:

This is not a story about the innate goodness of humanity. This is not a tale of redemption, or generosity. This is not about a good person who just keeps doing bad things. This is my story, and I am not a good person. I am greedy, and I want power and nothing, but nothing, is going to stand in my way.

This is a story about me, and these are the people who got in my way. And this… this is my restaurant.

I made so many typos in this.

First of all: I didn’t see the word “abandoned” at first and thought they were just setting up shop in an active Chipotle, like one of those people who buys one thing and sits there on their laptop for the whole day.

Second: Supervillains are all about branding and putting their symbol everywhere, why wouldn’t they change the name?

They wanted to be undercover, so they did their best to approximate what they think a Chipotle is, to avoid attention. However, they have zero interest in the petty details of fast food restaurants and did approximately zero research. Their idea was that they would draw the least attention by having Mexican food in a Mexican restaurant and zero excuses to be investigated by any kinda law or health enforcement. Which is why they accidentally made the most obviously fake Chipotle ever.

They’re kinda down and out, for a supervillain at the start, just had their last base destroyed by heroes, all their equipment wrecked, nothing to their name but a few million dollars which is a pittance by superscience standards. Chipotle was just the first building they found which looked generic and empty.

Of course, the ending to this whole story is when the ground opens up and they bring forth the doomsday weapon they’ve been making this whole time. After all, they do still want global domination.

i love abortion and i love divorce

i pop some pills and i ride my horse

i log onto tumblr and i start discourse

eyyyy macarena

this has the strongest 2014 tumblr vibe i’ve seen in a while, can’t believe this post is 5 days old

THIS POST IS FIVE DAYS OLD???? I THOUGHT IT WAS AT LEAST 2 YEARS OLD!!!!!!!

happy 9 day anniversary to this post 💖

date of origin: April 18, 2021

#it even has a deactivated blog

Look at that subtle off-kilter humour… the tasteful length of the reblog chain… oh my god, it even has a deactivated blog

I feel like terfs are such an obvious and clear example of how dangerous upholding only a single aspect of identity as being the Most Oppressed can be. They’ll fight for the prison system, at the expense of the black people who are the most OVERWHELMINGLY high demographic incarcerated. (Often falsely at that.), because their fear and hatred of men extends to bipoc men.

(Also, claiming that fear of rape is the only reason people would be against prisons is… insane. )

What’s so asinine is they keep yelling about “reform,” like what reform exactly? If abolitionism can be completely dismissed because “what about the X” then why on earth should we entertain any blathering about “reforming” a foundationally rotted system that doesn’t exhaustively have answers to every question too? Like how do you plan to “reform” Rikers? Solitary confinement? Cops and their unions?

It’s so disingenuous lmao, especially to pretend you care about “reform” while championing prison rape as some kind of “positive” threat.

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/what-will-survivors-of-sexual-violence-do-if-we-defund-the-police?fbclid=IwAR0Qb2br1TiOE7LhuO_aMgezQZVUp3kEphkafdnI3wv1mIrWmdroE-kgc94

this article is about another carceral feminist canard (the “but what about survivors who need to be protected from rape?” one) but this passage is still relevant

You know, for a group of people who claim to be motivated by how angry rape makes them, they sure do seem to like the idea of rape being used to punish people for being born with the wrong chromosomes or the wrong skin color.

I think you got Homestuck and Undertale confused?

why would i have seen the sequel if i never watched the original

This caused me physical pain

i’m just not into kids cartoon shows

….You’ve clearly referenced  gravity falls at least once in your posts.

I make an exception for anime

everyone likes the originals with macaulay culkin but I honestly preferred the 3rd movie

this post is cursed like medusa was cursed

looking at this post turns your brain to stone

I’m already rock hard.

oh. you made it worse how did you make it worse

this gives me negative nostalgia for 2015 tumblr

ma'am this post is from 2020

"adults trying to stay "hip" and keep up with youth culture and being years late is so cringey"

adult secret: its all intentional. nothing will prepare you for how fun it is to watch a teenagers face as you dab at them. i will floss when they least expect it and I will love every second of their horror.

fond memories of how one my shipmates would very earnestly ask the youngest deckhand ‘was that yeet? was that a yeet?” every time he tossed docklines

I take such delight and joy in making @mistresskabooms make horrified faces at me. This joy will never fade.

The only thing better, imo, is this particular example I have.

One of my grandpas is an artist and was painting a mural when a mom and her teen/tween son walked by, stopped, and he called it "bad." The mom, predictably, was appalled and about to chew him out, but my grandpa had had me as an assistant on jobs often enough he understood "bad" was how our generation was referring to neat things, appreciation, and the like.

Grandpa says, "It's okay, ma'am, I'm familiar with the lingo; my granddaughter speaks it, too," and turns to the son and thanks him. Kid beams because hey, older guy just understood him better than his own mom did! Despite the generation gap!

I wasn't present for this, but I was regaled with the event because I was the one who kept explaining current lingo among my generation to Grandpa, and it was his way of saying, "This is why I'm interested in linguistic trends. Because younger people deserve to have their language taken in the way it's meant, and I like learning anyway."

(Apparently the mom as they were walking away asked her son, "Why didn't you tell me this?" And all I can think is, I'm glad I have the family I do, because I could explain without getting into trouble that "bad" was basically a verbal abbreviation of "badass" which was school appropriate. Especially because school in the US typically is bad, and doesn't teach much of relevance.)

I think that it’s difficult for anyone who wasn’t of age in 2001 to fully appreciate just how fucking bonkers American culture went in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I don’t even mean the wave of hate crimes and military invasions; I mean things like, overnight, American TV shows went from depicting torture as a great evil to depicting it as a Good and Necessary Thing to Defend the Homeland; cafeterias in government buildings in Washington DC started listing french fries as “freedom fries” after Jacques Chirac opposed the invasion of Iraq; there was an NHL hockey game in 2002 where the guy who was to sing the Canadian anthem had his car set on fire by a frenzied mob chanting “USA! USA! USA!”; Evanescence had to add aggressive male rapping as a backup vocal to “Wake Me Up Inside” because her label was concerned that the culture had become too feminised; there was a government “terror alert” system that, every few days, would issue vague threats and warnings about formerly innocuous behaviours; Donald Rumsfeld briefly became a sex symbol; they postponed the release of Spider-Man for reshoots to incorporate more patriotic imagery; and all of this is barely scratching the surface.

(This, incidentally, is why I will never have a high opinion of Star Trek: Enterprise in spite of the fact that audiences have rehabilitated it to some extent in recent years; because I will never be able to separate it–and especially its Xindi arc–from its original context as a jingoistic analogue for the War on Terror)

Everyone forgets that this is where the grim dark “gritty realism” trend in television shows and movies came from. Before 2001 there was a lot on TV and in movies that was just dumb campy fun (anyone remember Charmed? Xena? X-Files?) And it was completely okay and it was acceptable and in that dumb campy fun we had good story arcs and we had good character growth and everything. But then after 2001 everything had to have an edge to it regardless of if it made sense to the story arc overall the particular plot or even a single or set of characters. Literally everything became all edge with no point other than to look “realistic” and justify some fake hashtag deep kind of dark philosophy about the world how you had to be hard and tough and realistic in order to survive.

God, this

i need some of you to realize that call out culture, by design, rewards people who make the most outrageous & aggressive accusations, without regards to truth or context. it encourages people to misconstrue, to erase context, to outright lie. it feeds the instinct to attack, with or without cause. 

and that naturally enables certain types of people (terfs, exclusionists, bigots) who already have a vitriolic bandwagon behind them, to target & harass minority bloggers whose inclusive platforms they do not like to see becoming popular.

this has happened time and again, it has driven good people off this site, it is traumatic and unhealthy to everyone involved. purity culture creates an atmosphere of fear & paranoia, i am begging you to reexamine this attitude of mob violence in online spaces

Going to recommend to my followers the Youtube series “The Alt-Right Playbook,” specifically the episodes Ship of Theseus and Never Play Defense. It’s frightening how many callout supporters don’t realize they’re using right-wing tactics to shut down discussion and distort the truth, purposefully or not.

And also, fuck it, both Natalie Wynn and Lindsay Ellis, while not literally perfect, have both been the victims of the Twitter version of this mentality to the extent that both allege they had mental health crises from the constant harassment and critically, the attempts to isolate them from allies. They describe how the mob made them fear working with anyone by practicing constant guilt by association with anyone seen near them.

Their videos on the subject of their experiences (and note that these were connected incidents, as each received spillover from the other’s “cancelation”) are shockingly similar in narrative: an incident, minor in itself, sparks a callout, which then snowballs into groups of people, some of them probably false flag actors, rapidly digging up and spinning hundreds of questionable or even totally inoccuous things and adding them to the list until the list of charges is vast, impossible or at least humiliating to comprehensively answer, and laced with actual fabrication. Amid this the mob reaches such a fever pitch that the threats of violence and “kys” begin to overwhelm all else. As it cools down other people already start trying to convince the canceled person that it was all just level-headed criticism, and that taking it as a personal attack (you know, like death threats) was a sign of the canceled person’s own mental instability.

I know we throw around the term gaslighting willy-nilly but I think that’s literally what it means.

And this keeps happening. The mob literally spammed messages during the Lindsay Ellis nonsense saying “Sarah Z, you’re next” and right now there are people on Tumblr trying to spin her review of the new Lorde album into… something.

Literally the inciting incident can be anything. For Lindsay Ellis it was commenting on the similarity between ATLA and Raya, which are fucking similar things. For Wynn it was a regrettable ten second cameo from a person with admittedly truscum opinions, whom she should have vetted better.

The reason it can be anything is thst you have a mixture of abused queer teenagers mirroring abusive behaviors, literal nazis and terfs and nazi terfs (a very small venn diagram) posing as leftists to sew discord, various people with mental illnesses whose online engagement is unhealthy, and various other people who are not acting out of pure rational interest in the moral behavior of online creators, all shielded with comparative anonymity on platforms like Twitter that are antithetical to nuanced discussion. Once you have a critical mass of people displaying this behavior they will attract more people, thrilled with being part of a mob, essentially.

If you find yourself mirroring this behavior… you need to stop and do some self-examination. Maybe try to get in therapy, because this behavior is often a sign of an unhealthy emotional engagement with internet creators that can be symptomatic of many emotional or mental problems.

You’re not taking down R. Kelly. This is not that thing. You’re participating in the mass harassment of a stranger on the internet. Over what?

https://youtu.be/OjMPJVmXxV8

I think both of these are very enlightening. My summary of the events is incomplete and by the fact itself I can’t tell you what it’s like to be the victim of a Twitter mob. They can.

thanks for the analysis

suggestions for gender neutral version of mom/dad? something less formal than just ‘parent’

please note that while progenitor, guardian, spawnpoint etc are all respected titles, they are more the equivalent of mother/father than an affectionate nickname you would scream through the house multiple times a day. gimme something we can use people

I just tried to combine the words and got “dom” and i cant-

but wait, if we reverse ‘dom’ you get ‘mod’. I suggest we use ‘moderator’ as a gender neutral version of mom/dad

Admin and op would work makes them sound powerful and in charge of everything

Admin (respectful) Op (derogatory)

i was going to add something else to this but instead i got to thinking and i was like huh. what could you use.

in most languages the word for ‘mother’ usually starts with an M, because phonetically [m] is one of the easiest sounds for a newborn to make when they start babbling, and mothers tend to be the one most around the child. so in my mind that crosses M off the list, because it’s automatically associated with a feminine figure

similarly, ‘father’ tends to start with D, T, P, or B. (phonetically these sounds are very close together; [p, b] and [d, t] are all only different because of being voiced or unvoiced.) these are also phonetically easy letters and ones kids pick up on earlier.

now the hard sounds for kids are the following: [ɹ, d͡ʒ, tʃ, θ, ð] or in normal speak: the English R, the “j” or “dge” sound in “judge,” the “th” sound in “thigh” and the “th” sound in “the.” and we don’t want kids unable to say their parent’s name for years, so those are also off the list.

additionally, it’s easiest for young kids to just repeat the same sound twice rather than figuring out the tongue gymnastics of putting different sounds together, which is why kids will say Ma-Ma or Da-Da and not Ma-Mo or Da-Po. and we’ll want to stick with low back vowels like “ah” and avoid ones like the hard “i” or “ee.”

so what does that leave us? when we want a sound kids can learn easily and early but don’t want to just put a funky spin on “mama” or “dada”?

my suggestions: G, K, W, L. i personally lean towards W and L. they’re called liquids, since they’re the consonants that kind of aren’t consonants, and kids (and ESL learners) will tend to swap out the English R for a W or L until they can learn the R.

if i ever have a child, they’ll start calling me Wawa. then when they get older, they’ll call me Wala, or maybe even Wally.

and then, once they’re finally phonetically developed, they can call me by my true title as their nonbinary guardian for their 18+ years:

Waluigi.

lying to people in positions of power (landlords, rental agencies, employers) to get what u want (a flat, a job, whatever) is cool and u should do it more often.

maybe it’s the Older Sibling in me but lying to people outright, by omission, or by implication is a useful skill. if the landlord says it’s not a party flat tell them you’re relieved to hear that because you hated living with people who had people over a lot. no you didn’t meet your future roommates through a facebook flatmate searching group, you met through mutual friends. you’re neurotypical and love working with people, customer service is your passion! you used to do tons of volunteer work in high school while also juggling extracurriculars and maintaining good grades which shows you’re really good at time management and like being busy, nevermind the fact that your school required you to do those volunteer hours. lie on the spot! adapt! you too can be the perfect person for every single situation! don’t feel bad about it! there’s no reason to be honest as long as it won’t directly be clockable as a lie!

It's not like landlords or bosses or hiring managers are going to be honest either. They'll say anything they can to exploit you the maximum possible amount. Exploit em right back.

surviving medical gatekeeping as a trans woman, I pretty quickly modified my ethics around honesty. people abandon the right to truth via placing themselves in positions of power over you; fear and sincerity can't coexist. Domination and courtesy can't coexist. Don't die for other people's refusal to understand that.

fear and sincerity can't coexist

i don’t like how endings in real life come on so suddenly without making sense, without much warning. one minute you’re in the middle of something and the next it’s all a very long time ago and you’re a different person and none of it is ever coming back

maybe so. we don’t get to say goodbye, always - this has been, for me, the hardest part of letting go.

(what would i have said? in my memory, i always rewrite last moments. i promise myself i could have texted more or done better, but - . real life, after all, isn’t full of movie speeches. i am learning the right moment is actually one that comes much earlier than you anticipated).

the world is, and this is not a metaphor, on fire. how can i tell you that things will make-sense. you are all too much, tragically, like me, online. i cannot will you to worship it away with the blind faith of getting better. globally, it might not.

but personally, one day - with age, and practice, and therapy (many) - you can learn something else, too. it is that endings are often actually cocoons. (a note about cocoons: they turn caterpillars into goo. i am writing to you from someone who has recently hit rock bottom. i can promise you this is the same situation, with the same premonition of agony).

new beginnings are not always sudden. they are clever, and difficult, and sneak up over the course of many nights. how ironic - we always want to say goodbye in a long aria of passion; we always want the change to just be there and over with - inevitably, it’s the other way around. new beginnings are rarely movie moments. when you move to the city to start your big-girl life, it is still just you, in different shoes, alone in an apartment.

when you wake up on your birthday, do you ever actually feel a-new-age. when it’s the day of the big event, doesn’t the event sometimes just feel strange - you keep reminding yourself this is it! it’s really happening! but then you’re crossing the stage in your cap-and-gown or you’re signing the papers on the house or you’re adopting the dog you’ve heard all about - and it’s just a day, like all the others.

the beginning doesn’t come, because beginnings are slow. the goodbye is quick, and the void comes sloshing in, and it seems - there’s just nothing, in an endless expanse, for miles. endings make a lot of noise, which makes the silence after them sort of unbearable. they like to make a splash like that.

we rarely, rarely get obvious beginnings. the bolt of lightning. the meet-cute in movies. you are maybe in the middle of a beginning, and you won’t be able to see it until you’re out of it. and at the end of the beginning - when you’re in it, you will look back, and it will feel like a goodbye, like - oh, when did that happen? and sometimes, that will suck ass. but mostly, you will look back on who-you-were and say, oh, i still love her, but i’m so glad we survived to be not-her.

the thing that gets easier is looking around and saying - oh, that’s lovely. because what changes is that things become lovely again. the softness slips back in. you start reading about hope and laughing again. you take up passion projects. you know how to set boundaries and walk away from arguments and how to hold your own when saying i’d like more ketchup. it doesn’t come quick. it is just a slow dawn of new color; the world slowly painting itself back in. and you will be, how ever improbably - happy.

some things won’t travel with you. i know this, and you know this. when they go, they are gone.

but when you survive, that memory of surviving? that always carries on. and the beginning will come. and it will sneak up into your heart and create a beautiful middle-of-something. and it will give you something new and different and strong and exciting. it will give you new music and new friends and new art. it will give you change. and you will not be taken apart.

I suspect quite a few people on this site don’t realize they are struggling with the effects of chronic trauma. In particular I think more people need to learn about the symptoms of C-PTSD.

Distinct from general PTSD, Complex PTSD is caused by prolonged, recurring stress and trauma, often occurring in childhood & adolescence over an extended period of time. There are many risk factors, including: abusive/negligent caregivers, dysfunctional family life, untreated mental/chronic illness, and being the target of bullying/social alienation.

I’m not a mental health professional and I’m not qualified to diagnose anyone, I just remember a million watt light bulb going off in my head when I first learned about C-PTSD. It was a huge OH MY FUCKING WORD eureka moment for me—it explained all these problems I was confused and angry at myself for having. The symptoms that really stood out to me were:

I’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile, because I’ve noticed that a lot of the people I interact with online have risk factors and experiences similar to mine. These include:

There are many other experiences that can cause chronic trauma, but these are some particularly common ones I see people in my own community struggling with. And I want more people to be aware of this, because we’ve been taught to ignore and second-guess the significance of our traumatic experiences. We’ve been taught to feel guilty for our own pain, because “other people aren’t struggling, so I shouldn’t either” or (contradictorily) “other people have it worse, so I shouldn’t complain.” But that’s not how it works—you are not other people, and you deserve to have it better. We all deserve better. We deserve to be happy. We deserve not to be in pain.

I used to think I couldn’t have a trauma disorder because (I argued in my head) the things that happened to me weren’t that bad. And then I spent five years in therapy learning to accept the full extent of my issues. I’ve since learned that trauma comes in many forms, and can happen quietly, invisibly, silently, chronically, and usually without the survivor being aware of the long-term repercussions of what they are surviving. That revelation comes later, after you have survived and must instead learn to live.

Finally, no single type of trauma is more real or harmful than any other. Severity is measured by the way the individual is affected, and the same situations affect different people in different ways. Because no one gets to choose how their brain reacts to trauma. No one gets to choose their hurt—otherwise there would be a hell of a lot less hurting in the world.

We can, however, choose to seek help. We can learn to recognize when something is wrong, we can learn when to reach out to professionals, and we can learn to educate ourselves on our injuries.

And gradually, we can learn to heal.

ko-fi

you know how some parents do that toxic thing where they don’t notice or reward kids for improving their behavior, but every screw-up gets remarked upon and used to inflict shame? so you’re stuck in that awful cycle where there are no rewards, only the inevitability of eventual punishment?

and how that makes it extremely hard to judge your own actions or grow into a better person, because there’s no one to confirm that you actually are doing better, and are capable of improving, and are not doomed to forever be a terrible person incapable of growth?

ok so: I don’t know how to explain to you that we’ve built a social media culture that treats people the same way. with the same abusive cycle.

That sounds like cancel culture

I don’t know what to call it anymore. people get heated about terms like “purity” or “cancel” or “call out” culture, or can’t seem to agree on a meaning. I’m not talking about like. no longer supporting rich and powerful celebrities when their abusive actions come to light. I’m not talking about holding people accountable, or warning people about active abusers. but I am seriously concerned about how we treat social media users once they get even a small amount of attention, even in small niche spaces.

I am concerned about this culture of combing through years of people’s social media accounts, looking for “problematic” shit they’ve done. I am concerned with the whole culture of using “call outs” as a tool to harass and ostracize users large and small. I am concerned about the malice we spread behind people’s backs, in screenshots and posts they aren’t able to see. I am concerned with this culture of demanding apologies for things said years ago, things already outgrown and regretted, and of ignoring those apologies even while pilling on more censure. I’m concerned about this whole culture of accusation and misinformation, where the most outrageous claims and holier-than-thou performances are rewarded with notes and views, even as facts are ignored and context removed. I am concerned about the lack of accountability, the way the accused is given no opportunity to defend themselves from the onslaught, the way their responses and explanations go ignored, the way any charge can be made at any time on any evidence, with no ability to appeal or exonerate. I’m concerned about the way this culture targets minority users and turns their own communities against them. I’m concerned about the actually harmful and predatory behavior that is lost in the bog, and how we have lost the ability to distinguish between shades of gray with any level of sanity. And I am concerned by the sheer number of people who fail to realize they are perpetuating bullying and harassment.

I am enormously concerned with the way people who are “called out” are never forgiven, never allowed to make amends, never allowed to grow, how their efforts to learn and do better are ignored even while strangers callously repeat and reblog and retweet the same criticisms ad nauseam.

And I see this everywhere, happening to anyone. And yes, this applies to larger accounts and youtubers and “influencers,” and a bunch of content creators who may or may not be making a decent living off of their work, but who are certainly not “rich and powerful celebrities.” (Because apparently we spend so much time in online microcosms that ya’ll can’t tell the difference???) Christ, my blog isn’t nearly as large as some people seem to think, it’s obscure by most measures, and still I’ve been the target of mass harassment for years. I’ve seen bad and watched others go through worse, seen users with far larger and far smaller followings driven off of this and other platforms—driven off with a violence and bloodthirst that had nothing to do with making a community safer and everything to do with a toxic culture gone wrong. Fucking fix this already.

Abuse is still abuse when it happens online, when done by strangers, when done anonymously, when done en masse. Now do BETTER.

This post hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting. I read the first paragraphs, about being raised in an environment where you’re punished for every minor transgression and never praised for anything. This is exactly the environment I was raised in, so it got me seeing parallels, and none of them were to social media.

My parallels were to all the jobs I’ve held where if I was perfect my “reward” was not being screamed at. To my peers in school who would bully me for every little “weird” slip up that demonstrated that I’m neurodivergent. To every marginalized person or group I’ve heard disparaged over the smallest thing. And in a moment of unexpected understanding I realized what it is about discussions about “cancel culture” that always felt off to me.

The way we treat each other online is not new. It is not unique. It is not some modern product of the rise of ess-jay-double-you wokescolds. It’s the way we’ve always been taught to treat each other, we do it offline every day. The only reason anyone sees it as unique is that the nature of it being online means that it isn’t as precise in only targeting those who we’re taught to turn a blind eye to.

Fixing this and doing better is systemic, which I guess I should’ve seen coming since most things are systemic. I definitely don’t have an answer to this, but I can see now that no amount of “just not cancelling people” is the answer, because “cancelling” is just a fancy way of dividing twitter fights from all the other ways we’re actively taught to be horrible to each other, and if we’re not pulling this up at the roots we won’t really fix it. I feel like I should end on advice so, burn the capitalists in your heads and radically support each other? That’s probably a good first step.

some of my own observations from starting out online at like 12 in 1997 and watching things develop:

1. all thrown together: people of wildly different backgrounds and knowledge bases are all communicating and very quickly which leads to everyone essentially being embarrassingly ignorant all the time. To alleviate the resultant discomfort we lean into:

2. humans want things to be simple and easy. We want the cliff notes version rather than the nuanced and lengthy explanation and all of the background to understand it, especially if it doesn’t involve us or interest us. “That’s bad, don’t do it. This is good, say this.” Easy to remember, easy to understand, easy to preform for the above mentioned need for a reward in the form of approbation or inclusion. Details and nuance, especially with the vast amount of stuff being discussed isn’t possible, practical, or comfortable all the time.

3. technology out pacing culture: adapting socially to new technology via etiquette and convention can’t keep up with how fast everything is going. How I learned to behave online at 12 has gone out of date several times and I’m only 36, and I don’t mean the things relating to me being a child then and an adult now but that almost none of what I learned as an early teenager even can be applied to tumblr in a practical sense. Everyone keeps having to make this up as they go, and due to point 1, we all have wildly different ideas on how to deal with things and different expectations. And it all changes multiple times in your life, you can feel out of touch and dated at 25. Social norms always have their problems and are always changing, but their lack of cohesiveness and turbo speed changing online has it’s consequences. Volume is also an issue–the sheer number of new things we need communally agreed on rules for is staggering. Similarly:

4. zooooom!: even before the internet and then it’s upgrade to high speed internet the pace of life has been accelerating and this means we expect things to go fast. We’re used to things going fast and even want them to, to some degree. And includes social media feeds and communication. Long posts were more common in 2011 when I joined tumblr and there were not tl;dr summaries. There’s a difference in how I type when I chat now than back in the AIM days–more comments sent before the other person actually finished their point (other people do it to me too). You used to wait more before you replied. Now it’s go go go! That also come connects back to point 2. And in part may come from point 3 especially how we can now use our phones in small moments like waiting in line where we previously could not have been trying to interact with humanity in the same way, things have to fit into those spaces now. The word count limits and easy to understand sound bites fit into smaller spaces.

5. Everything is everywhere. tweets are shared on tumblr and tumblr posts end up on facebook and facebook posts are referenced in youtube videos and so on. Context is easily destroyed or lost even within a platform. There’s so many games of telephone going on and everyone hears things through the grapevine and this is both a natural extension of human gossip and information sharing AND used maliciously and it’s all mixed in. Point 3 and 4 mean Information literacy can’t keep up and the potential stage for point 1 is horribly massive. Also your nudes may end up out there or a video of your horrible murder may get shared with strangers for their entertainment (or so the demand justice….it depends…).

6. grip on reality. while I think we’ve moved mostly away from considering online some kind of opposite of “real life” given that many very real things like shopping and work and school can happen online, now it’s like: you can get a grandma changing outfits in a spiral across your screen from the same app you get make up tutorials from and someone teaching you to change your oil and someone with professional level production lip-syncing a pop song and….what IS real life? Plenty of what is on the internet isn’t real and is meant for entrainment even if it’s not sold to you as such but it’s all mixed in with serious discussions about politics, practical skills, gossip, real news, fake news, airbrushed/photoshopped/facetuned influencers, etc. This started to some degree with TV but has gone so much further with the internet. Do you consciously know the difference between reality and funny videos? Probably! But wait there’s more to this point! At the same time that all this is happening, along with you getting plenty of your marketed entertainment online, there’s all the communication and engagement with other humans that’s happening through a screen. You can insult someone on the otherwise of the planet now in real time or fall in love with them or find real friendships or stalk people or bully them. You can do this to people you’ll never seen and never have to deal with real world consequences for harming them or helping them. This happens often in the same apps where you talk to people you have met and may indeed experience some consequences for your actions good, bad, or complicated. Is online real? It only seems to be part of the time. Do you know, if asked, that I’m a real human with a face and a life and feelings? Probably! But at the same time I’m a voice in a sea of mixed reality and unreality. And it’s not like we haven’t had infestations of bad actors inserting themselves into conversations like this to manipulate us, that’s a thing that happens. So how much personhood does your brain assign me while you scroll by?

Is this the real life or is it just fantasy? Caught in a landslide no escape from reality indeed.

And all of this stuff isn’t necessarily negative! But how it fits together leads to some of the problems mentioned and why they’re so complex and hard to solve.

It feels to me as if many people don’t know where to place other social media users in their mind’s social landscape so they end up simultaneously demanding the accountability of a close friend or family member from them (acting as if every mistake of theirs had hurt them personally) and the public presence curation of a wealthy celebrity (treating their social media feed as a piece of fictional media).

These parasocial relationships make us hold each other to impossible standards. You can’t treat human beings as if they were a TV show just because you experience them as a “stream of content” and you can’t treat strangers as if they were personally close to you just because you have read intimate details that they have shared. It’s fucked up.

These are all…very thoughtful and insightful additions. Thank you.

Someone in the notes pointed out this is a form of what we used to call cyberbullying, and they’re right. And it’s terrifying the extent to which it’s become so normalized that we don’t even use the word cyberbullying anymore. But it is. It’s bullying. It’s harassment. It’s abuse. And it is happening on an unprecedented scale. We are constantly receiving messages encouraging us to engage in these behaviors, and telling us it is good and right, that we are morally superior and will be given attention when we contribute to this culture. (And that if we don’t, then we ourselves are fair targets, so it is important to strike first, and mark ourselves as one of the “good” ones. Because we have all seen what happens to the “bad” ones, and now there is fear buried inside us.) These behaviors are spreading like a virus, for a combination of reasons, and they are traumatizing our communities and their most vulnerable members.

Earlier I said I didn’t know what term to use for this trend, which has at different times been called ‘Call Out’ and ‘Cancel’ and ‘Purity’ culture, words different people have objected to and used and misused in different ways. Cyberbullying doesn’t quite fit, because it’s an old term that evokes the image of an anonymous, isolated troll hiding in a basement. But online harassment is increasingly done out in the open, by multiple participants encouraging others to join, many of whom don’t even realize (or choose to ignore) that they are acting out of mob mentality.*

Maybe it’s time for a new term then. I know what I personally will be calling it:

Harassment Culture, plain and simple.

Because that’s exactly what it is. A culture promoting harassment of individuals–mob harassment, one-on-one harassment, harassment based on malicious misinformation, harassment based on genuine concerns, harassment blown out of proportion, harassment of users with platforms large or middling or microscopic. Harassment of anyone, anytime, for any reason, without warning. And harassment culture is everywhere, ingrained in our social media norms, influencing our thoughts and behaviors, poisoning the way we treat others, blinding us to the humanity of our peers–reducing people from humans to targets. And we are all at risk of becoming victim and bully both.

We need to disengage from this toxicity. We need to inject some sanity, some kindness. We need to step back, and breathe…and then pull out a fucking microscope and make a good long self-examination of the way we speak to and about other internet users. Of the words and attitudes we spread, of the way we are affecting real people we don’t know. Because you are not screaming into the void. Because there is always a human on the other side of the screen.

Because pain is easy to ignore when it is happening to a stranger in another room. Because when we hurt people from a distance, we do not hear the muffled sobbing. So we forget too quickly that the trauma we are inflicting on each other is horrible and real. It is so real.

I’ve said it before and will repeat it again:

Do not let an obsession with being “right” or “good” prevent you from being KIND.

*Mob violence is harder to recognize online. In real life, if you look around and find yourself surrounded by an above-average number of pitchforks, that is your first and strongest clue that you’ve accidentally joined a mob. In online spaces, the pitchforks are hidden behind other people’s screens, and therefore harder to keep accurate count of. (Until, of course, they are pointed at you.)

ko-fi

Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old

One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism

reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century

That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.

Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.

Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.

In other words, resistance is not some cartoon where we all throw bombs or some such. It is as simple as getting everyone to down tools and go home.

The violence comes from them, not us.

I mean resistance can be everyone throwing bombs. That’s an option.

A general strike is also a very powerful tool. But if you’re not gonna fight back at all when they come to brutalize and shoot the strikers, that probably isn’t a winning strategy. There’s only so much pain and death that a striking people can endure before they either become demoralized and give up, or become fed up and choose to fight anyway (only less prepared, less well-armed and less strategic than if you had been prepared to fight from day one).

Dogmatic nonviolence has a decent track record in creating policy changes and sometimes ever in replacing one politician with another, but it has a terrible track record in creating genuine system change. See more Peter Gelderloos - The Failure of Non-Violence: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-the-failure-of-nonviolence

So imo there’s probably some amount of bomb throwing involved in successfully bringing about an anarchist society, even when it isn’t the core element of your revolution.

Dogmatic nonviolence is also a good thing to have in your social media history. Not to tip my hat or anything. I am absolutely sincere in my nonviolence.

To step away from that default for a moment, let’s be real about this. It’s not the 1900s any more. Winning an actual fight with a state army is all but impossible in any modern nation. So yeah, violent reprisal is the obvious follow up to any major strike and yes there is no moral wrong in defending ourselves…but it’s not like we’re going to win those fights. Getting into a bomb throwing fight with people who have predator drones ends badly.

Either we get a strike broad enough that it undermines that capacity for violence, or it’s doomed from the start.

What rock do you live under? People are winning street battles against modern well-armed states on a regular basis in the 2020s. Have you not been paying attention?

Expecting recent examples of a full successful revolutions is kind of rich when your alternative of nonviolence has thus far has never brought down a state (fyi - if you quote Ghandi, you’re getting a 2+ hour history lesson on how bs that is).

my favorite thing about the furry fandom and how well they treat artists is that eventually some of the most renowned & respected artists of our time are going to be very talented people who at one point honed their skills & paid rent with furry art

arent furries like very successful and spend lots of money on commissions and stuff? like I’m sure I heard of some well known furry with a high paying job in silicon valley or as a doctor of some sort and he drops so much money on patreon and commissions. furries deadass stimulate the economy more than billionaires

“furries stimulate the economy more than billionaires” is exactly the kind of hot take I came to this website for

They’re also just like, overall such a kind and generous and helpful group of people? I was at a con once and getting upset because I was going to be late for a panel, but getting seen and heard when you’re in a wheelchair is hard as fuck at times - especially in loud and crowded places. I could hardly move a few feet at a time with how many people were around, and it’s not really an option for me to push through or shoulder tap to get someone’s attention. I was apparently very visible in my frustration to anyone actually taking notice of someone at waist height. Anyways, a furry noticed and came over to me to ask if I was okay, and when I explained the situation they gathered their group and marched in front of me and along side me, loudly clearing a path through what felt like a million bodies for me to follow through. It was like having my own personal chaotic and brightly colored army as escorts, and I felt pretty damn cared about by this horde of strangers.

I didn’t bump into them again after, but I think of them often and hope they’re all doing fantastically and are having happy lives.

holy oats you got escorted by your own PRIVATE MILITIA OF FURRY BODYGUARDS this is LEGENDARY

So I (finally!) bought a pair of really good noise cancelling headphones, and it has changed my life! It’s the fanciest thing I’ve bought in years, so to recoup some of the cost, I’ve researched & written a little essay based on my experiences with extreme noise sensitivity.

Hypersensitivity to sound is something I’ve dealt with all of my life, but I only recently found out it’s medically known a Hyperacusis. (Please note this is a separate condition from Misophonia.) If you consistently struggle to cope with noise, the info below could be helpful! I’m including a link to my ko-fi, and I will be answering questions in the notes.

(skip to the bottom to read fun facts about my tax return and/or street organs vendettas!)

holy shit, thank you enormously!!!

I hope this post was helpful, and thank you to everyone who shared their tips and experiences in the notes!

THATS TUPPERWARE

i thought delaware was a place in ohio? why are there so many things named delaware?

delaware is too powerful

what the fuck

Wait what? I thought Delaware was a store with building supplies. Like paint, wood, nails and stuff?

THATS HOME DEPOT ???

I know home depot, but dude I don't know anything about America mad have never been there. Are you sure there is not a some sort of store called something close to Delaware!?!

.....ace hardware....?

this post has only been around for a few hours but could very well be a world heritage post

but at what cost

This post launched at 8am PST on 12 Feb 2021. The above conversation has happened in 3 hours.

he WHAT? i thought he was from. w. wait. ???

delaware stole the presidents shoelaces for clout and became too powerful

From the UK- and what do you mean Delaware isn't a type of ceramic?

it is now

@hellsite-hall-of-fame is it too early?

Isn’t delaware what they make computers on???

software ??

I think they meant Dell Ware, a specific computer type. We had a Dell computer once.

I thought Delaware was that famous singer they spoofed in Zootopia.

gazelle??

oh i thought delaware was that one british singer lady, you know, the one from chasing pavements

that's fucking adele

isn’t delaware that place you go when you die

youre thinking of superhell and all of you are going there

how the fuck did any of you come to the conclusions you all made

we live in america?

I thought Delaware was that food delivery service that keeps interrupting youtube videos with their ads when I'm trying to have a good time

..... are you talking about Doordash???

Isn't Delawere the name of that one girl in the song that goes "Hey there, Delawere"? She's from NYC or something.

THATS HEY THERE DELILAH

Pausing here to point out that op is “dear-AO3″ and now I’m wondering if Delaware fanfic would be categorized as RSF (real state fic) or AU (alternate unitedstates)

stop i do not want to think about this 

Isn’t Delaware that SPN ship that exploded the internet

Everyone on this post:

I love that the “no, that’s [x]” meme is making a comeback here and only here and nobody has any idea what’s going on

Keep up the good work, we can make poor OP have a melt down yet. 

Isn't delaware that one brand of pizza that's like "it's not delivery, it's delaware."

isn't delaware the god of the sea

Isn't Delaware the name of that guy who painted the Mona Lisa?

delaware is that one evil cyborg guy that has a son named Luke and a red laser sword

Thats Darth Vader. Im pretty sure Delaware is that other red-laser sword guy. You know. The one that stabbed Qui-Gon.

what have i created

I usually only reblog older posts, but this definitely deserves to be in every tumblr hall of fame

this post has only existed for 8 days. 

happy one month birthday

This is just the “no odd number have the letter e”post

it’s ALL odd numbers have “e” silly!

(odd numbers end in the digits 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 (one, three, five, seven, nine) and the only ones for which the word version doesn’t end in those words are/end in eleven, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen. I will NOT elaborate or defend this lest this post become another. ur free to do this yourselves if you want tho)

i mean no even numbers end with 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9

oh no please dont make another number discourse im still reeling from the last one

What about infinity, if it's infinite the technically at one point as it goes on forever it does end in in either 1,3,5,7, or 9 but because it's infinite it's neither even nor odd. Yes? No? Idk I'm drunk

this was posted exactly one month ago to the minute. 87k notes.

@dear-ao3​ do you need a hug

yes

What a chaotic energy and turn of events.

Almost woke my sister up when reading this, laughed way too hard

here, for all you fuckers asking, this is the damn delaware post

Infinity isn't even a number it's forever in like noun form

i mean, yea infinity itself it’s a number, but it represents an endless amount of numbers. basically i’m pretty sure you’re right and idk what my point is here.

Is it a number though? Can there be an infinity-1? How do we represent it numerically? I mean it’s definitely a measure of some sort, but is it definite?

Infinite just means unending, so no? You can't add to or subtract from infinity, because as soon as you define infinity, it becomes finite. Its not a number.

^ this exactly!

Why has this turned into talking about infinity this post was about

Delaware

this is just everyday tumblr chaos lol

You’re the most recognised and internationally praised superhero, but you don’t fight any crime. Instead, you use your powers over stone and metal to repair the damage caused by the catastrophic fights other heroes get into.

They didn’t call you a superhero when you started. You didn’t claim to be one, either. 

You didn’t have a costume or a sponsor or training or anything like that. You were just a kid who had just seen your entire world knocked down. So, in a moment of childish determination and belief, you thought you could fix it all. 

The first emergence of your powers wasn’t a huge triumphal moment. Moving stone and earth and steel doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about how to stack things up so they don’t fall back over again. 

Your first attempts crashed right back down again. That was your first lesson. 

—

Even when you got good at what you did, they didn’t call you a superhero. 

You still didn’t have a costume, but you’d gotten your hands on every architectural diagram you could and done plenty of practice. Then you started to show up to the aftermath of battles and put them quietly together again. 

But it still wasn’t right. You couldn’t do much if you didn’t have the diagrams for the buildings demolished–if the city planners didn’t let you have them.

So you stitched together a costume, something bright and colorful that would grab the attention of the cameras on the scene afterward as you tried to work. 

“Look! Someone’s putting those houses back together!” 

The effect was instantaneous. The moment you’d grabbed public attention, there were requests for interviews, think pieces–each giving you a platform to ask for the help you needed. 

This was your second lesson. 

–

You didn’t call yourself a superhero, or come up with the name yourself. You were never really good about all of those things. But once the attention was on you, you got offers from managers and sponsors. One, a blonde with perfect hair who introduced herself as “just Sandy” 

“I don’t have any money.”

“That’s alright,” she said, her grin showing spectacularly white teeth. “All I need is for you to take on some gigs and give me a cut.” 

Sandy set you up. She got you the costume people would know you for, gave you the name, managed all of the PR and set up interviews. Your fame skyrocketed, and soon you were seeing yourself on billboards. 

Soon you had access to hundreds of city plans and blueprints. After enough attacks happened, you learned them well enough to hardly need to reference them. After a few years, you could rebuild a tower in a matter of minutes, and cities in a matter of days. 

Your powers evolved as your understanding did. Soon, you could read the entire layout of a building just from touching. Then, just from touching the ruins. You no longer need blueprints, then–just your own hands on the metal.

The gigs were simple, too–just fixing up hero bases after they’d gotten wrecked in attacks. Feel good work that paid well. 

With the help of many people, you do more. That’s the third lesson.

—

The problems started with the homeless thing. 

You were in between projects and itching to use your skills more. Creating homes for the homeless seemed like the perfect, feel good project to flex on. 

It was, for the first few weeks. Then came the backlash. City dwellers crying foul, saying they hadn’t agreed to an enormous den of undesirables in their backyards. There were protests, white suburban moms holding up signs about drug dealers and rapists and criminals. 

It wasn’t your choice in the end. Eventually the city mandated that you deconstruct your shelter, or they would do it the hard way. 

Regretfully, you took it down. You did not look in the eyes of the people that had sheltered there as they had to go on their way.

It was the same story in every area you tried to build shelters in afterwards.

—

“Can we just buy the land to build them houses?” you asked Sandy. 

She clicked her perfect teeth. “Sorry, there are laws against building new things in the city. You need mayoral approval to start a new construction project.”

“Why?”

“Well, there are already too many empty houses,” she said matter of factly. 

You stared. “What? Then let’s just buy those and put people in them!”

“You don’t have that much money,” she pointed out. “Not when you’ve been giving it away every year. Also, it wouldn’t do as much good as you think. Just think of the effect on the market–”

This is not why you fired Sandy. But it was the first time you thought of it.

—

Opinion started to turn against you when you began using your interviews and platform to talk about this problem, to demand permission to build or otherwise help. Exasperation turned to hostility when you started to reshape the landscape to be softer to the unhoused, anyway–when you created caves in parks where people could easily shelter, or made every bench large and soft so that anyone could have a place to sleep.

Laws and ordinances passed, all regulating the amount of alterations one was allowed to make to public property. About how many changes you were allowed to make as you were reconstructing a city. The fines for altering things started to heap up. 

Firing Sandy didn’t help. Your good reputation was always as much her work as yours, but after what she said about—you couldn’t. 

You couldn’t. 

You learned not to read the scathing opinion pieces on you. That was the hardest lesson yet.

—

Of course, shit really hit the fan when you were contracted to rebuild another base.

It was a simple enough decision for you. You found out they had been building drones and firing them on civilians. That at this base Techno has been building surveillance technology that would be able to monitor every single person in the country at every moment, and be able to fire upon them with impunity the moment suspicious activity was detected. 

It made you rethink every base you had built in the past.

“No,” you told them. 

“You already signed your contract–”

Instead of dignifying that with an answer, you transmuted the entire area into the rockiest, most impossible terrain you could. Every trick you had learned to make land easier to build on–you reversed it, turning what had once been the base into a precarious canyon of jagged, diamond-hard steel, nearly impossible to remove or build on.

“I said no.” 

—

Stopping the construction of the stadium was the next kicker. 

“You’re insane!” said the heroes who came to remove you.

“They evicted a hundred families for this!” you spat. “Those were people’s homes. It’s disgusting that it’s allowed for the government to do that–much less to do it for-for a stadium? For entertainment?” 

And so you stood there for the next 48 hours, deconstructing every single thing they tried to put on their ill-gotten land. 

Then, they sent the heroes to stop you. You were never the best at fighting, so they knocked you out quickly.

—

They don’t call you a superhero now. Behind bars, you glance over every thinkpiece and profile about the world’s most beloved hero fell. You read speculation about evil, greed, madness. All things you’ve heard about “villains” who came before you. 

It makes you wonder about those people. If maybe you had misjudged them, too.

But that’s alright, you realize after the sting of it fades away. That was the second lesson, after all–more than anything, you need people to be talking. And for all the bitterness in these words, you realize grimly that people will never stop talking.

Once you’ve thought things through, you decide you’re ready. The steel of your cell melts away. After all, there is no prison that can contain you. No earth or stone or metal can withstand your will. 

Your legacy as the world’s greatest supervillain begins with a left turn down the hallway, right to where the other villains are kept.

Brilliant. Positively Brilliant.

same energy

there’s more

SIGH

here’s another one

IT GETS WORSE WITH EVERY ADDITION

how does this get even worse

I think about once in a while...

We have another one...

Guys me liking durian is not socially acceptable

I'm so frustrated with news media culture

This CBS article showed up in my newsfeed. I normally don't click on articles like these, but I read the headlines. My instinctive response to this headline was "what a tepid, noncommittal response from an uncaring administration." Mainly because that's the mental framework that media & social media has taught me to use.

Then I clicked the article:

What Biden actually said was that these laws are an atrocity (they are). He literally called them "Jim Crow in the 21st Century" (completely true). He made a sweeping condemnation, taking a far stronger stance than the headline implied--stronger than the media has taught me to expect. A much more accurate headline would have been "Biden condemns Georgia election laws" or "Biden calls Georgia election laws an "atrocity"".

As a progressive, I have enough complaints about the Biden administration without media companies purposely trying to mislead me with this shit. Keep in mind the vast majority of people who read the headline will not click on the article. That is just how headlines work. And this is just one of dozens of small but incredibly harmful journalistic practices. The U.S. media constantly twists words & highlights the wrong information in order to drive wedges between liberal voting blocs while unifying the far right and I am sick of it.

Always read critically, and hold your news sources accountable.