I just finished watching the first two episodes (plus the very beginning of the third) of season 5 of Love Is Blind, and this old crone has at least one thought she wants to shout out into the void:
Social media filters are ruining people’s chances of happiness by creating unrealistic expectations of people’s appearances. With the first couple to get engaged (Teacher Barbie and Firefighter Ken—I’m not invested enough yet to remember names), Teacher Barbie admitted she wouldn’t normally be attracted to Firefighter Ken because he had a gap in his teeth. Friends, it is a small gap. Nearly unnoticeable unless you have honed your expectations of humans on social media filters and concomitant dental procedures to make faces look like filters. A gap I would have barely registered if I was still in my 20s and dating (those halcyon years of the early aughts), and one I, as an oldster in my 40s who doesn’t use social media filters didn’t register now (probably because I’ve reached the age where the orthodontic interventions experienced by me and my contemporaries in our teen years have fallen victim to years of relentless sleep grinding which have, much like the grinding of tectonic Pangeal plates, created shifts and gaps and overlaps in our once-pristine smiles. Anyway, Teacher Barbie seemed visibly unnerved by Firefighter Ken’s tiny gap. While I think there were other aspects of their meeting to be legitimately unnerved by (the non-consensual first kiss, the kisses in triplicate, the awkward staring, the JimBob-esque hair), the tiny tooth gap seemed to be an odd point of fixation.
No idea if I’ll post again about this dumpster fire if a show I keep watching. Tune will tell. Until then, turn off your filters, young ones. Take a chance on a person whose teeth aren’t perfect of whose features aren’t airbrushed into nonexistence. You might be pleasantly surprised. (Or not, but at least it’ll be an adventure.)
Not a particularly good writer, not a particularly compelling narrator/protagonist, not particularly convincing character development, and not a particularly surprising “twist.”
That said, given her sprinkling of erotica/sex dust throughout her book, and it falling into the thriller/suspense genre, it’s popularity isn’t surprising.
One more question(for now) why do people on tumblr use tags to talk #like this #about whatever they think of the post, instead of just commenting on the reblog😭 Is there an etiquette I'm missing?
short answer: yes.
long answer, there is an etiquette to it, and I think it's a longstanding thing that just ended up ingrained in a lot of users, which comes off as cold/shy/outlandish or maybe even standoffish to people from other sites and apps. there's no be-all end-all of how to act online or on here but i think in terms of most* people (*speaking broadly, making this up) who've used tumblr for a while it feels like this:
tumblr is a theater, the dashboard is a stage, each post is a performance. (a joke, a dramatic act, a story, a movie, a picture, etc.) you have a variety of ways to interact with the performance, but some of them are going to be more frowned upon--based purely on how the long standing visitors of the theater are used to acting, honestly.
likes are a polite applause, but they don't show anyone outside of the theater that you enjoyed yourself, or what you enjoyed. the performer appreciates the applause but does not garner any new viewers when you only like a post, btw.
silent reblogs mean you exit the theater with merch or a leaflet and go show it to other people. look what i saw on the stage, don't you want to see it too. this shows the performance to a new variety of viewers, who might then also show it to others.
replies and reblogs with content are often seen as """"rude"""" because they're like standing up at the end of the performance and loudly saying "that was okay but I think MY take on things makes it just a BIT better." people are more forgiving of this when it's something universally true or acceptable, or when it's very funny. if it's not (and even if it is, sometimes,) there'll potentially be a reblog down the line making fun of it (and this is another person in the theater standing up and making a fart noise, regardless of how tasteless or rude.) it's never actually "wrong" to add comments on a reblog unless you're being intentionally hurtful, and it's normal to add commentary to a friend's post, but even then, people seeing this from the outside may see that as obnoxious and impolite and try to call you on it anyway. (people are very weird about enforcing what they see as a universal rule of etiquette, when this is admittedly the only site where you'll be punished for adding to the discussion.)
and again, this is an absolutely arbitrary rule because what one person finds universally true and hilarious, another will find trite and stupid and too niche. the polite thing to do in the case of the latter is just reblog from further up the chain than the commenter, but people aren't always nice when they're annoyed.
getting to your actual question now, comments in the tags are a way to leave remarks that you DON'T want to shout to the whole theater. these are you whispering to yourself or your friend, or writing in a guestbook on the way out. people can see/hear it if they go looking for it, but you're not shouting over the performance to get your piece out. it's polite because it's unobstructive and doesn't take up space, and if your tags don't make sense to someone else or seem too niche, they don't have to share the post with your commentary attached.
adjacent to this, "peer review" or screenshotting someone's tags to insert them in the post is like if you did whisper to your friend, then your friend wrote your comments on a whiteboard and held it up for others to see. as this is a form of commentary within the reblog, it's again subject to an arbitrary universal/niche rule. just because a tag gets peer reviewed doesn't mean it's beyond reproach by strangers.
also in line with this general line of thought experiment, blazing a post means that between acts, you run up on the stage and start shouting your piece. it is, once again, going to be more acceptable to strangers to see you do this if it's something universally funny, true, or cute. this is why niche fandom posts, vent posts, and self promotions get ignored or booed down, while pet birthday photos and silly jokes get blazed and get a lot of notes regardless.
lastly, a kungpowpenis is when twelve+ individuals from the audience get up and beat the shit out of the person performing on stage and leave their corpse on display in the town square.
to add: In The Time Before, reblogs were not part of a chain straight down but each subsequent reblog indented the ones before it more and more, like this:
depending on how far the reblog chain went, the original post – the thing you were, in theory, responding to – would be so far indented that it was practically unreadable, or (this happened automatically, but no one liked it) all of the posts above a certain point would be turned into a link to the lowest blog's comment, and treated as reblogs of a link rather than reblogs of a post. so no one would even see the original post, just the reblogs.
so refusing to reply in reblogs actually had a practical application: it meant that you weren't literally supplanting the original post for your "yeah, I agree!" addition.
Tags also used to be natively visible ONLY on the dashes of your followers — even the OP used to have to dig to find people’s tags, only comments were visible in the notes.
The people who follow me have signed up to see my thoughts. They WANT to see my cheeky Critical Role commentary or my linguistics jokes or my hot takes on Glee or Teen Wolf (or at least, they have decided that they can put up with them and they follow me anyway). Anything I put in the tags is visible to them — they get to see my jokes, think “heh lol”, but when THEY reblog their followers only see THEIR tags. I see them continue the conversation, but anyone who follows them doesn’t have to see my particular brand of commentary unless they look for it.
If I comment on a post, I’ve decided that my addition is for EVERYONE AFTER ME. My followers can veto that decision (by going to the person I reblogged the post from and reblogging the “clean” version), it I’m making an active choice to try to get my comments seen by more than just my followers. Which comes across as VERY pretentious.
I feel like I am literally caught in the pages of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 right now, and it has broken me.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so enraging and made me feel so helpless. I can’t stop crying, and I have no idea what to do about that, because my life needs me to function like an adult human being.
Something that pisses me off about Victor Frankenstein is that he refused to create a female version of the creature based mainly on “What if they make more monsters”. They are made out of human parts, he didn’t change anything involving their DNA. Any kid they have is just going to be a human.
This is why you shouldn’t have dropped out of college, Victor.
He actually did make a female creature, but the book suggests he found her attractive and was horrified by the idea of his male creature putting his hands on her (and then making creature babies), so he literally hacked her still-inanimate, grave-robbed body to pieces in front the male creature, intentionally robbing him of his one small hope he had to not remain a solitary, shunned outcast forever. Putting aside the fact that she may not have wanted to have been with the creature, the fact that Victor refused to fulfill his role as father/creator and provide his creature with the chance at companionship and happiness because of his own selfish desires is just one of the many ways he’s a huge asshole.
Additional asshole behavior: becomes so obsessed with his pursuit of the alchemical science of reanimating he basically abandons his family and fiancée, lets an innocent woman be sentenced to death because he fears being labeled as “crazy” by others, creates a creature of immense size and unattractive features because he wanted to complete his science project quickly and bigger was faster, robbed graves to create his creature, runs away from the creature the second he opens his eyes, labels the creature a “monster” the moment of his animation, refuses to give his creature a name, causes the creature immense physical, emotional, and psychological pain by abandoning him when he is the equivalent of an 8-foot tall infant, abandons his new bride in the honeymoon suite the night of his wedding in order to exact revenge on the creature (and in his myopic obsession w the creature decides he, and not his new bride, is the target of the the creature’s threat of violence, which, spoiler alert, he’s not), tries to convince the sea captain who was nice enough to pick his frozen, half-dead ass to ignore his crew and continue sailing north into frozen waters do that he can continue his pursuit of the creature, etc.
There’s probably more I’ve missed, but yeah. Brilliant book (the original 1818 version—the later 1830s edited version isn’t as good), arguably first science fiction book written, and just chock-full of cool literary devices. But Victor is an unmitigated selfish asshole.
Someone gave my husband a pour-over coffee thing and honestly I don’t see how having to boil water and pour it over coffee and wait is any different than using a coffee machine, except now it requires more effort and a longer wait time when all I want is the caffeine to get into my bloodstream as quickly and easily as possible.
For a second I thought the people posting and commenting on this were sharing this tweet bc they were in agreement but then I was relieved that I am following the right people
Also Bernie gives 0 shits about social niceties and “his image” bc he is a Brooklyn Jew not because he is a White Man ™
Instead of an either/or, perhaps it’s a both/and situation.
Bernie is dressed as he is because he lives in New England and New Englanders generally don’t fuck around with cold weather wear (my New Hampshire in-laws a testament to such an attitude) and he doesn’t give a shit about social niceties and such because he is a Brooklyn Jew *and* because he is an old white man he gets to be adored and appreciated and memed to death because his gender and race give him a pass on having to confirm to the social niceties that women and people of color are expected to confirm to or face harsh social reprobation.
