#pseudosalience

[strange-grace]

ok tumblr no. look i get the fact that the Way Things Currently Are web platforms need to make money to sustain their existence--i deal with this in my career all the time--but i do not like the deliberate layout changes that make ad posts in people’s blogs (at least in sidebar-preview-mode) look almost identical to their actual reblogs.

dudes idk if i’m just naive and ridiculous but it seems to me like we should all be able to cooperate in order to give People Who Want to Say Things Online Ways to Say Them while 1) making sure the people doing the work to create/maintain that platform are able to pay their mortgage/feed their family/pay their employees, which would then 2) allow them to run their organization without defaulting into an antagonistic relationship with their platform’s users where there is a perpetual arms race between Your Attempts to Monetize Humans vs The Natural Human Impulse Not to Want to Be Monetized.

it seems obvious to me. idk. tumblr didn’t take off in the first place because it was mass-financed by internet-savvy millionaires; it took off because it did a thing nobody else was doing. once you have an audience why do you not automatically become partners with that audience and make your fundamental priority expanding/improving-upon-what-brought-them-here-to-begin-with?

???? ?? 

[strange-grace]

one of the biggest paradigm shifts i experienced during college--and one of the things i think causes the biggest misunderstandings when it comes to Media Analysis--is that just because a creator didn’t mean to mix an element into their creation doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

and it especially doesn’t mean that “well i don’t think the author/artist/etc MEANT for [x] to symbolize [y]” is a valid argument for why people shouldn’t talk about the relationship between [x] and [y] in that author/artist/etc’s work.

in fact, this is often a way more interesting and illuminating way to talk about [x] and [y]--when it comes down to “what was it about this creator’s personhood and environment and culture and time that caused them to, perhaps unintentionally, take in and send out this particular [x]-[y] relationship?”

this is something i think about a lot. and i think a lot of people don’t get it. especially because the highschool-english-101 method tends to be “show kids book. explain the 3 Symbolism in book. make kids write 5-paragraph essay regurgitating 3 Symbolism + 3 Meaning.”

and i suspect this is at the frustrating root of a lot of sj conversations about Irresponsible/Harmful Media. 

because people assume they can go “well that’s probably not what the creator MEANT you to think” and that that’s the end of the conversation.

it’s weird how often i repeat the experience now, as an adult, of re-encountering some piece of media that was part of my childhood, and realizing oh. this is why i think this Bad Thing about myself. 

because this art set up a correlation between Neutral X and Negative Y and my 9-year-old brain knew i was [X] and subconsciously tucked away the secret truth that that meant i was also [Y].

and i don’t mean that to suggest that there are kinds of media that Should Not Exist. (most of you know i tend to come out on the “overly permissive” side of the SJ Problematic Media Conversation for other reasons it’d take too long to get into here, and i’m pretty sure i’m secretly evil anyway, but whatever.)

but rather that i wish we’d all have the collective intellectual honesty, with ourselves and with Young People, to talk about how the internal microcosms of Pieces of Media operate, and how best to grab hold of them so that they become tools instead of thorns.

[strange-grace]

future legit blogpost maybe: why i’m uncomfortable with criticisms of I’m Not Like Other Girls(tm) that are solely condescension and mockery and disgust. 

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there are a lot of girls who lived most of their childhood and adolescence being told over and over again by The Other Girls that they Weren’t Like Them. 

there are a lot of girls who tried for years to learn how to become Like The Other Girls only to have The Other Girls laugh at their pathetic attempts to pretend they belonged. 

and sometimes when these girls discover language that shames The Other Girls it feels like a means of self-defense. it feels like an identity that moves beyond failed photocopy of something Real. and when you’ve been carrying around so much Otherness for so long it’s easy to jump at the chance.

learning why this is something you shouldn’t do is a hell of a lot bigger than “it’s wrong; don’t do it.”

it involves learning to see people who’ve caused you a lot of pain as victims of the same systems of oppression that you are. 

it involves learning to forgive other people for snatching at whatever scraps of power they could find in a world that wants to make them powerless.

(recognizing that just because you understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful.)

(realizing that you’ve been doing the same thing.)

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i get repeatedly frustrated by mantras of “if you get rid of your internalized misogyny and just be nice to The Other Girls you’ll realize they’ve actually been your Feminist Sisterhood BFFs the whole time!” 

because 1) sometimes that isn’t how it works, and 2) that’s not why you shouldn’t do it. even if The Other Girls are never going to give a shit about you, you still shouldn’t do it.

you can’t turn the language of your own oppression into a shield and expect it to genuinely protect you. 

you can’t be sure it won’t hurt people just like you.

you're drinking the same poison and expecting it to be its own antidote.

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learning this is much harder, much more complicated, and much more important than just learning to change the way you speak. and implying otherwise is robbing people of the ability for genuine personal growth. 

if your argument--when heard by women and girls with certain life experiences--just sounds like “be nice to your female bullies for the sake of The Movement,” you’re going to alienate the exact people you’re trying not to alienate.

yeah it’s really fucked up that pervasive cultural misogyny has divided women into so many angry scared factions turning that same cultural misogyny on each other. you’re probably just trying to get them to see how fucked up it is. and you absolutely should. but that’s not going to automatically erase years of knee-jerk reactions to being angry and scared. and acting as if it ought to is holding these women and girls to a bizarrely high moral standard that i don’t think it’s humanly possible for most of us to reach.

if what you have to say is important enough, you can learn how to say it in a way that people can hear. 

[strange-grace]

another thing to add to my infinitely-growing list of Real Blog Posts to Write on a Real Blog When I Finally Set One Up:

adobe stock just bought out dollar photo club (the service we’ve been using for stock photos at work for like a year now) and it reminded me how i feel some kind of way about adobe funneling everyone into subscription-based everything.

pre-adobe-creative-cloud--when i was in middle school/high school/college--obviously there was no way i could drop another few hundred dollars every few years when a new version of photoshop came out. so i would just hoard money until the programs i had were SUPER out of date, then spend it all to get the new ones. 

it was a super expensive single purchase, but i could plan and choose if and when to make it. it’s not like my old copy of photoshop would disappear in the meantime.

but the thing is there’s no way 15-year-old-me could have paid a $50/month subscription fee. no way parents would have paid that much for something i wasn’t directly using for school at the time. and when i was in college--when i literally did need it for school and work--committing to something that expensive would have been SUPER frightening. (a lot of those adobe subscriptions are “[x] amount of money per month for a year.”)

so like THIS MAY SOUND OVERDRAMATIC BUT the mandatory-subscriptionness for these programs limits access to them to only people with 1) a certain consistent amount of spending money, and 2) relative confidence that that money will continue to be there in the future. 

which just doesn’t sit well with me. because a huge part of why i have my job now is that teenage me wasted so fucking much free time messing around with photomanip tutorials and designing websites for friends and such. i literally remember the exact moment i realized i wanted to go into graphic design, and it was at like 11pm one night while i was digitally coloring-in some (probably shitty) lineart i’d drawn. if i hadn’t had the ability to learn and practice for fun, the whole trajectory of my life might have been different.

so i feel like there are definitely 15-year-old kids alive today who are missing out on that kind of discovery because their parents can’t commit to a $50/month subscription. and it’s just emblematic of Money-as-Gatekeeper-of-Knowledge and how much of a problem that is in the tech world and idk.

[strange-grace]

the most interesting moment of the rare disease symposium today (for me) was during a “panel” segment with several parents taking questions from the audience, after i asked what they’d found to be the greatest institutional obstacles in the medical world.

one mom’s immediate response was “because he [her child] is so pretty.” apparently it took a long time before she could get any doctors to give him the tests he needed because he usually smiled and laughed and seemed “normal.” nobody took her worries seriously until the kid had a seizure in front of a doctor, at which point they “decided” she’d been telling the truth.

another mom of two now-adult autistic children talked about how they weren’t able to get those diagnoses until their twenties, because they were both also physically disabled from birth, and any other developmental or health struggles they had were automatically assumed to be because of that. (”of course they have Social Issues, they’re Not Normal.”)

and i was just thinking about how like 90% of people i know with some sort of invisible disability were at some point dismissed in one of those ways. either it’s just something we already know, or there’s nothing wrong with you so stop worrying. 

and it had just never occurred to me that people with difficulties as severe as these kids’ would get treated the exact same way.

apparently, no matter what, you just can’t win.

[strange-grace]

a sporadic thought-progression that occurred over the course of today:

[THIS POST GOT OUT OF HAND I APOLOGIZE]

1) how/why did “popular, public, accessible art that expresses difficult or painful emotions” become a targeted shorthand for, not just mocking jokes, but cringe-humor-esque mocking jokes..? (oh no, wow! this person doesn’t understand how ridiculous and undignified their simple sincere expression of emotion is! oh god! how embarrassing!)

2) how/why, at the same time i remember seeing this surface (mid/late 2000s), was there this cultural nostalgic swarming (among teen- and 20-somethings) back to the 90s-grunge drugs-and-self-destruction Artist/Aesthetic that painted it as a More Sincere More Legitimate Creatively Enviable experience/expression of difficulty/pain..?

3) how/why is there (over the past several years, off and on) this sudden upwelling in Art by the Culturally Cringeworthy artists of point/era #1 (thinking specifically about the most recent fall out boy/p!atd albums) that looks a damn lot like the work that defined point/era #2..? (and now additionally that carries the weighted presence of that reality--both of the aforementioned bands have their “i survived the 27 club” songs.) 

(the love/hate push/pull breakup/breakdown/blissful anthems to self-as-destroyer/self-as-destroyed--the dual recognition of the insatiable magnetism of the thing and the unattainable deadliness of it--the ascetic ascension and the inevitable fall--the banal earthly mortal consequence of surviving yourself--)

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(i remember writing this summer about realizing/remembering how my teenage self had always assumed i would die young. for no real reason. because that’s what Happened to People Like Me.)

(that’s what we Did. that’s where we were Going.)

(that’s why people told sixteen-year-old me to stop listening to evanescence and start listening to alice in chains. because i was Too Good for that. i was Too Good to survive myself.)

(you die a fringe martyr or live long enough to become a pop punchline.)

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and i wonder now if we’re seeing the start of a rolling-back against that grain. the blunt carving-out of a space for all the people who didn’t expect to be here and don’t entirely know what to do with it. 

for a kind of living in which you can recognize the equal weight of all those parts in you, and not bury one to serve as the scaffold of the other.

(because i kind of really hope so.)

[strange-grace]

so i’m newly in love with last week tonight (the john oliver show)--which, for some reason, i didn’t know about until last month.

and i just saw the standardized testing episode and had two mini-flashbacks to middle school (which was still technically homeschool, but through a charter school, which provided a few “enrichment” classes and academic advisors for parents and kids.)

1) in seventh grade, there was a “reading comprehension” section about a fake brochure for a zoo, which was advertising its new exhibit of “endangered white tigers.” i got confused and stopped, because i knew that white tigers aren’t a species; they’re a variation of albino mutation. so i asked the test facilitator guy what to do, and (with obvious irritation) he told me to just ignore it and try to answer the best i could. which i tried to do, but was so thrown by the factual inaccuracies, i was no longer sure if the “right” answers were what they were going to mark as “right,” and it was stressful and upsetting to 12-year-old super-perfectionist me.

2) that same year, i found out about a younger kid (like second or third grade) who had started crying and had to be taken out of the testing room, because he’d refused to answer questions dealing with the solar system having nine planets, and kept insisting the questions were wrong because pluto wasn’t really a planet. this was in 2003, when the whole pluto debate was still going on. this kid was super into astronomy, and knew that a bunch of important astronomers believed it wasn’t a real planet, and he’d decided he agreed with them. but apparently caring a lot about science meant he got a bad science test score that year.

basically standardized tests are bullshit and make intellectually-curious kids test WORSE by confusing them or just being super wrong and i hope that astronomy kid eventually felt super vindicated about his mini science protest and was like WELL STANDARDIZED TESTS NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON SAYS FUCK YOU TOO.

[strange-grace]

sometimes i realize that there’s nothing STOPPING me from going to the store in gym shorts and a t-shirt without makeup on.

like

it’s not against the law in any way..?

they can’t refuse to sell me stuff on the basis of acne scars and laziness..?

i don’t know anyone who works at the store so there’s a 99% chance nobody will comment..?

the worst possible consequence is that a stranger thinks quietly to themselves “wow that’s a hideous person.” and i genuinely don’t care about appearing attractive, even to people i know.

but nevertheless it feels like A THING I CAN ABSOLUTELY NEVER EVER DO.

and i realize it’s not so much on the level of shame or selfconsciousness, but more part of the train of thought that tells me i need to Exist as Quietly as Possible All the Time.

and the thing it’s about THE LEAST is Being Attractive.

(it’s about Disappearing.)

and i’m remembering how, when i was the most miserable and selfconscious about my appearance, it was in high school, and it was about finding a way to be Safe. to take the weapons out of everyone’s hands by making them meaningless. 

(i remember the summer i started shaving my legs, i was taking a swimming class at a pool nearby, and one of the swim teachers didn’t shave and everyone mocked her behind her back. and i remember my mom telling me it was my choice, that not everyone decides to shave, just look at _____ from swim class! she doesn’t and it’s okay!)

(and i remember how that was what decided it. i remember saying but i don’t want everyone to treat me the way they treat her.)

(i was like twelve or thirteen. i never legitimately experienced Being Attracted to Anyone until i was seventeen.)

(it’s never been about being pretty. it’s always been about being safe.)