@pscentral Event 10: Best Of 2022 | 2022 Tumblr Memes.

lou reed of the velvet underground, 1974.

After passing peer review here is my drama recommendation tool

Maybe I will update it in the future but for now I am happy to have watched enough good dramas to make it.

So on the matter of this absurd deflection tactic I'm seeing from antisemitism apologists, where they're like: "Um sweaty, if you play a game with a race of short, hook-nosed goblins who all work at the fantasy bank, and immediately see them as Jews, then that's a YOU problem," I would just like to be crystal fucking clear about something:

We are not "seeing Jews" when we look at the goblins in the Harry Potter universe (or the reptilian Illuminati overlords and diminutive, rat-faced hagglers in your beloved science fiction franchises). Most of us are Jews, and are therefore pretty fucking familiar with how actual Jewish people look and behave (we do not have horns; we do like to share our very strong opinions about how to garnish latkes and hummus). None of us are seeing a Ferengi merchant from Star Trek, or Gargamel from The Smurfs, and thinking "Oh wow, he's the spitting image of my Great Uncle Moishe, and I'm mad about that!" This is not, and has never been, about seeing genuine reflections of the Jewish people.

No, what we're seeing are characters and tropes bearing a strong resemblance to the grotesque antisemitic caricatures that have been used in efforts to dehumanise, disenfranchise, and decimate us for centuries. We know damn well the goblins or dwarves or greedy reptilian space overlords aren't accurate depictions of real Jews—but they are evocative of age-old antisemitic stereotypes, and that's the actual fucking issue here. This isn't some weird thought exercise where we just free associate random things with Jews based on our own skewed self-perceptions. We're saying to you, "Hey, the imagery in this piece of media is uncomfortably reminiscent of the bigoted tropes constantly wielded by our oppressors to hurt us, and that's a problem, because it's both compounding our trauma and subtly reinforcing people's unchecked antisemitic biases," and you're effectively telling us to fuck off in response.

Like, if you don't care about antisemitism I can't change that, but you don't get to accuse Jews of being "the real antisemites" simply for pointing out the similarities between the short, hook-nosed, child-stealing, banker goblins in your shiny new video game and the blatantly anti-Jewish stereotypes used to demean us throughout the course of human history.

what do you think of tone indicators in general?

unfortunately my thoughts on tone indicators are somewhat nuanced. fortunately, this is tumblr not twitter, so I can just write out my full thoughts in one post and be as verbose about it as feels necessary.

speaking as an autistic person (and I know there are other autistic people who don't hold this same view, this is just my perspective), I think as an accessibility tool, the extended set tone indicators in current popular use is fundamentally misguided.

the oldest ones, /s for sarcasm and /j for jokes, make sense. their notation isn't the most intuitive thing ("does /s mean sarcastic or serious?") but it's not too difficult to explain what they mean. I've had to spend my whole life learning by brute force what different tones of voice mean and what they change about how I'm supposed to interpret something, so I already know what "read this in a sarcastic voice" and "read this as a joke" are supposed to mean. my existing skills can be translated into the new form without too much effort.

the same thing applies to emoji and emoticons. I know what facial expressions mean, because I had to learn what they mean. figuring out if :) is sincere or not from context is a skill I've already needed to develop. it doesn't come naturally for me, but it's something I already at least somewhat know how to do.

most of the tone indicators in current use uh. don't work like this.

tone indicators like /ref or /nbh don't correspond to specific tones of voice. I don't have a "I'm making a reference" voice or a "I'm not talking about a person who's here" voice that I can picture the sentence being read in. these do not indicate tones, they're purely disambiguators. they clarify what something means without necessarily changing how it would be read out loud.

and on paper, that's fine, right? like, it's theoretically a good thing to take an otherwise ambiguous statement and add something to it that clarifies what you meant by it. the problem is that these non-tone tone indicators are not even remotely self-explanatory. it's up to me, the person who is being clarified to, to know what all these acronyms are supposed to mean, and how they change the way I'm supposed to interpret what something means.

it's, quite literally, a newly-invented second set of social cues that I'm expected to learn separately from the set that I've already spent my whole life figuring out, and it works completely differently.

sure, these rules are (in principle) less arbitrary than the rules of facial expressions and tones of voice and how long you're supposed to wait before it's your turn to speak, but they're also fully artificial and recently invented, which means they're currently in a constant state of flux. tone indicators go in and out of fashion all the time, and the "comprehensive lists" are never helpful.

in theory, I appreciate the idea of people going out of their way to clarify what they mean by potentially ambiguous things they post online. if it worked, that would be a really nice thing to do.

however, sometimes I imagine what the internet would be like without them. what if instead of using /s, the expectation was that if you're sarcastic online there's no guarantee that strangers reading your post will know what you meant? what if instead of inventing more and more acronyms to cover every possible potentially confusing situation, we just... expected one another to speak less ambiguously in the first place?

so, I on paper like the idea of tone indicators. I think it's good that some people are trying to be considerate by being extra clear about what they mean by things. but if tone indicators didn't exist, and people who wanted to be considerate in this way instead just made a point of phrasing things more clearly to begin with, I think that would be vastly preferable to even the most well-implemented tone indicator system.

also /pos sucks because there's something deeply and profoundly wrong for an abbreviation that means "I don't mean this as an insult, don't worry" to be spelled the same way as an acronym that's an insult

Compilation of tumblr users getting upset at decoy videos/posts/links:

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SO HELP ME TUMBLR GET RID OF THAT FUCKING "NEW" FLAG ON THE TUMBLR MART ICON

it was "new"

i clicked it

it's no longer new

TAKE IT AWAY

I miss the days when, no matter how slow your internet was, if you paused any video and let it buffer long enough, you could watch it uninterrupted

outsiders and boring normal people and fandom newbies always think that buckwild kinky porn fanfiction is the strangest fandom hobby but they are wrong.

the strangest fandom hobby is plotty fanfiction, the kind that requires research, because engaging in this hobby makes no goddamned sense.

it doesn’t even give anybody masturbation material, which is at least a logical and admirable goal that contributes to the betterment of society, or at least society’s solitary orgasms.

in other news i hope the cia spyware monitoring my internet usage understands that i’m googling information about smuggling drugs in thailand because i want the details to be right in a single paragraph in a 10,000 word story about a gay mafia guys.

Twitter really said "you've read 300 posts time to go touch grass"