*not actually in void* @screechesintothevoid - Tumblr Blog

Someone calls out to you.

…

But you do not remember them.

The hyper realism in ff games is so weird bc they want them to still look like anime people but refuse to make them look cartoonish bc they also want you to see all their pores and details so they just look like live less husks

lets-jam-deactivated20240101

and their emotional range in this style is :) :| :( no ugly crying, screaming, anger, joy, nothing intense…

thewittyphantom

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

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?

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

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?

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

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.

tomboyjessie13

That sounds like cancel culture

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

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.

scarlet-rosepetals

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.

graylibrary

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.

carlamiaumiau

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.

nicollekidman

no it’s so fucking funny staff is just apparently ignoring the fact that 90% of the content on this website basically becomes illegal the second you bring money into the equation sdkfjghfjdslk

bluebandana

actually tumblr should pay ME for sticking around this long

xo-philia

Why are people surprised this is accurate I did research

puzzler00m

his admission

marvelsmostwanted

I can’t see media coverage of billionaires launching themselves into space just for funsies without thinking about how horrible, how just... pure evil, you would have to be to think that you, personally, deserve to do whatever the fuck you want and have useless ultrabillionaire hobbies, no matter how stupid and wasteful, while people literally suffer and die from an ongoing pandemic and can’t afford healthcare, while children go hungry, while homelessness is on the rise and climate change is actively causing raging wildfires and floods and storms that are destroying people’s homes... If you can look at all of that and then look at your literal cartoonish pile of gold and think “I’m going to take myself to space”??? Fuck you

radicalurbanista

July 17, 2021. Los Angeles

Police shoot, beat, chase, and arrest anti-fascist counterprotestors yesterday. The counter-protestors began demonstrating outside a Proud Boy anti-trans rally at WiSpa. The police beat clearly marked press and shot either a rubber bullet or bean bag at a woman at point blank range. The police even got an AMBER alert sent out citywide as part of their suppression of the ant-fascist protest.

Police explicitly protect fascism and fascists.

augustdementhe

Police explicitly protect fascism and fascists.

noping-out-deactivated20241117

You'd think after the fascists tried to beat cops to death with thin blue line flags on Jan 6 they while have learned something but apparently not. Oh wait that's right the group of fascists beating the cops also included cops.

badjokesbyjeff

An engineer and an anti-vaxxer walk up to a bridge

Seeing as the bridge is the only crossing over a notoriously crocodile-infested river, the two prepare to cross. Just before they set foot on the bridge the anti-vaxxer halts the engineer.

- How safe is it to cross this bridge exactly? - he asks

- 99.97% - the engineer replies confidently

The anti-vaxxer thinks for a moment before turning around:

- Guess I’m swimming then…

lizardlicks

change your god damn url OP

zitasaurusrex

“This bridge was built with new technology,” sniffs the anti vaxxer.

“It’s untested! I have no proof that it’s safe.”

“We’ve… we’ve driven so many cars over it,” sobs the engineer.

whatbigotspost

“Couldn’t believe this was true, so I read the bill myself. Sure enough, TX Senate just passed a bill to remove Frederick Douglass, MLK, Ces

————-

More dispatches from the front lines of the culture war aka Texas. The rage is never ending and exhausting

note-a-bear

I'm not trying to be a shit about this but like we *need* solidarity over this because the alarm was being sounded almost 20 years ago when W let Texas (and other southwestern states) start cutting out Mexican and Chicano history.

As a reminder, Texas constitutes one of the largest textbook markets. Whatever they remove, smaller and/or poorer states will struggle to put back or compensate for when they make their textbook purchases.

That means how Texas goes a disproportionate amount of school resources go.

titkoks

“let’s compare the sound of her little flipper-flopper feet on different surfaces”

cypopps

auditory processing issues

napaholic-ivy

Ah, yes, my fave response is “fair enough”. Even better, fake laughing at someone’s joke even though you didn’t hear or understand the punchline.

paxamericana

headspace-hotel

concept: there are lots of different worlds and all of them have different levels of access to magic. Some are just all over the place and some have no magic at all.

You would think that we would be one of the strictly non-magical worlds, but actually, that’s not the case—we don’t have like, a huge excess of magic, but we have, like, dreams, and the placebo effect, which puts us pretty solidly in the “Numinous” world category.

headspace-hotel

This post brought to you by the placebo effect, which is completely insane if you think about it for more than like 3 seconds

but for some reason we insist on thinking of it like “so people’s symptoms improve, but like, it’s Fake” rather than “HOLY SHIT humans are so powerful, they can improve the symptoms of their illnesses just by believing they are being cared for.”

headspace-hotel

Anyway just imagine like

Human, suddenly sucked by portal into a Magical Land: damn I wish I came from a magical world lol

Elf wizard dude: hahaha bro what are you talking about

Human: well, my world is just—

Elf wizard dude: what about the magic rocks????

Human: What magic rocks?

Elf wizard dude: You know, the magic rocks. The ones that generate near infinite energy by tearing apart the fabric of their reality? You know, like, uranium? You haven’t found those yet?

Human: Wait wait wait. That’s not—

Elf wizard dude: And like, come on, you even have some low level necromantic spells over there, like—

Human: We do not have necromantic spells, what are you talking about

Elf wizard dude: didn’t you say your friend was an EMT though? they do that shit all the time. Hell, you don’t even have to be like a high level caster or some shit, it takes like a few weeks to learn CPR

Human: Wh—

Elf wizard dude: You guys do have CPR, right?

Human: I mean yes but—what the—CPR is not necromancy!! That’s not how it works, it doesn’t bring people back from the—well I guess technically it does but that doesn’t—

Elf wizard dude: Next you’re going to be telling me Mothman doesn’t “count” either.

Human:

Human: …

Human: …What.

headspace-hotel

Human: You don’t understand. I mean…Radioactivity kills people!

Elf wizard dude: Ohhh. You got just the cursed magic rocks.

Human: …

Elf wizard dude: Damn. That sucks man.