Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
um = around
die Welt = world
die Umwelt = environment
ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person
der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter
-ung = -ing
die Vermüllung = littering
ver- = see before
zweifeln = to doubt
-ung = see before
die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation
die Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung = …
This is a german compound on the spot master class and I am LIVING
I wrote an incredibly long post on Dreamwidth about the Tumblr purges and what happens next! Here’s the first bit, which I’m quoting here as a little bit of a fannish history lesson for all you young’uns, probably it’ll get deleted, thanks Tumblr:
First: let me start off by saying that it is very probable that Tumblr will back out of this particular bad idea. They often do. The pattern of fannish archival catastrophes at the hand of corporations almost always has five stages: 1) a sale, or rumored sale, of the platform; 2) falling or nonexistent profits; 3) pressure from (pick at least one) governments, morality warriors, and/or advertisers/other corporate interests; 4) the actual fannish archival catastrophe, caused by a change in the TOS or in the enforcement of the TOS, which itself frequently comes in multiple stages; and 5) a second sale of the platform.
Strikethrough, for example, wasn’t a single terrible idea executed badly, it was at least two terrible ideas executed badly: first Strikethrough, which happened in May 2007; and then, following masses of outrage (particularly outrage from fans), some limited concessions from LJ management; followed by a second round of permanent suspensions conducted a little bit differently, a.k.a. Boldthrough, in August 2007. These tend to get lumped together in fannish memory, but I want people to remember that they were not a single event.
And those two events, themselves, are also not the whole story: Strikethrough itself followed on well over a year of rumors that LJ was changing its TOS/enforcement of its TOS, ever since LJ had been sold to SixApart in 2005, who were trying to monetize the site. Likewise, alongside those rumors, LJ’s adult content—which, unlike Tumblr, may actually have been predominately fannish, because I don’t think actual porn producers used LJ anywhere near as heavily as they use Tumblr—had been under continual attack from Christian pressure groups because it hosted material that they claimed was “harming children” [I can’t find a source on this, but I remember it very clearly—if anyone has a source, lmk in comments and I’ll link], what with all the fannish erotica with clear disclaimers on it that it was intended for adult audiences, frequently (as with pornish_pixies) posted in locked communities. There was, simultaneously, a lot of pressure being put on LiveJournal by the Russian government, because another group that heavily used LJ at the time was Russian political protestors. On top of that, there was a lot of rumor about LJ/SixApart’s advertisers getting antsy about blogs containing adult content [I can’t find a source on this either—if anyone has a source, lmk in comments and I’ll link].
So, in short, here is what happened to LJ: 1) LJ was sold to SixApart; 2) SixApart tried to monetize it; 3) SixApart got pressure from a) the Russian government, b) the Christian anti-porn police, and c) advertisers to bring its “adult content problem” under control; 4) LJ deleted a whole bunch of blogs, backed up and said “mea culpa”, and then… deleted a whole bunch of blogs; and 5) SixApart sold LJ to the Russians.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Following this pattern, here is what I suspect is going to happen to Tumblr: 1) Tumblr was sold to Yahoo (now owned by Verizon); 2) Yahoo/Verizon tried to monetize it; 3) Yahoo/Verizon got pressure from a) various governments, including Indonesia and China, b) the anti-porn/anti-sex-work/anti-shipping moral purity police, and c) the Apple Store to bring its “adult content problem” under control; 4) starting earlier this year, Tumblr deleted a whole bunch of blogs, backed up and said “mea culpa”, and then… changed its TOS and started deleting content [← we’re here right now]; and 5) Verizon will sell Tumblr to ? ? ?
It’s possible that we’ll have another couple rounds in Step 4. It’s not like 2 rounds in Step 4 is magic, or something; my point is just: Tumblr has already backed down once. You see where that gets us (fucking nowhere, that’s where). That said? The death throes are going to take a while. I was still reluctantly cross-posting to LJ in 2015; as late as 2013, LJ was still a lot of fans’ primary home. Six full years after Strikethrough!! Six! Full! Years! After they started deleting our shit, and banning our friends!!! And in that six years, all that happened was LJ’s TOS got continually and aggressively more restrictive, while the Russians were banging up all the political dissenters whose content they’d purchased into jail.
My point, here, is just that we have been here before. Exactly here. We have done this before, exactly this. Tumblr may take a while to bleed out, and they may try to triage it, but the writing is, in fact, on the wall: Tumblr will throw us off whatever cliffs they need to to try and eke out a profit for the morons in Verizon’s boardroom; and in the end, our data’s going to get deleted, or it’s going to get sold, because that is just how these things go.
So we need to figure out where we go next.
Please read/reblog/reply—I really do want people to weigh in! I’m not promising to keep tracking this on Tumblr (come to DW, the water’s fine), but I do want to hear what people have to say.
This means that we’re almost out of time for human history to contain “that time someone stole the unit of mass, and we had to catch them to get it back for the mass of everything to be well-defined again”.*
For fun theory reasons, we need someone to plan and execute a heist, and soon.
(* Well, okay, on a global scale. I’m sure this has been done for smaller local reference objects through history.)
The first thing you have to understand is that no one wants us. No one has ever wanted us. And by us I don’t mean fans in general, but creative Fandom, if you will. Transformative fandom–writers and artists and gif makers and vidders and podcasters and podficcers and the community that supports them.
Don’t be fooled by the occasional mainstream media article that uses mostly respectful language or the academic study that talks about transgressive fannish behavior like it’s admirable. People reading those news articles laugh at us and you don’t exactly see universities creating Fandom Studies departments.
Nor do we have the buying power we like to think we do. Think about it. We wouldn’t have to transform media to suit ourselves if that media already existed. If Marvel gave a damn about Fandom money vs fandom money, they’d be the ones posting the explicit Cap/Iron Man pics. They’ll take our money, but it’s not as important as small-f fandom money because there’s nowhere near as much of it.
So that leaves ue as exactly what we are: extreme niche hobbyists. And you know what? We’re not even nice, easy, safe, niche hobbyists like knitters or…idk, curling fans. We like trangressive sex a whole lot, we tread a very fine legal line in a time when intellectual property laws are a big fucking deal, we’re hard to advertise to, and, to make things worse, we have a nasty habit of dragging our platform admins into our petty, internecine Fandom Drama.
(seriously it’s like if the dude who runs the Giants SB Nation site went running to the SB Nation admins saying that the dude who runs the Dodgers site is a pedophile just because he implied Madison Bumgarner might be a little racist.)
But Telesilla, you say. Are we really bound to your fate? Destined to spend our fannish lives like you have, migrating from one site after another, always losing people and history along the way? This is so depressing! There has to be an answer!
Well, once upon a time I thought the answer was “by fans for fans” and wow, have I been burned by that one. Our greatest triumph is routinely attacked by its own users and our best functioning social media platform doesn’t have the bells and whistles corporate sites can offer. And AO3 and Dreamwidth are the success stories. Ask me about JournalFen. (on second thought, don’t. I don’t have the energy to explain without overusing the word “robust” and talking about ice weasels.)
I’m enough of a Old Time Internet Person to still think doing it ourselves is the best answer we have, but it takes a special kind of person to dedicate themselves to serving a notoriously fractious internet community that has no money and wants you to cater to their every whim. It takes an even more special kind of person to do it long term. Fandom history shows us that those people don’t come along often. (personal history shows me that I am, alas, not one of them.)
Until they do, we’ll just lurch from corporate platform that doesn’t really want us to corporate platform that doesn’t really want us. Because that’s the bottom line–we’re an extreme niche hobby and there’s no real money to be made off us. Under late capitalism…well, I don’t want to be that Fandom Old, but really, what did we expect?
someone who’s chaotic good (me) should never be allowed to run a bakery by themself (my job)
Why
well I work for a bakery inside a grocery store and we end up composting a Lot of stuff because it’s a commercial chain and they don’t care because capitalism
so every night an hour before closing, I look thru all the stuff to see what expires the next day, and I make it “free samples”
then I hang around by the cookie table and the donut case and whenever kids come around talking to their friends abt “if they don’t buy this, they can afford that,” “do we have enough money to buy donuts?” etc, I chime in and I’m like….
hey…free samples over there take as many as u want…..take the whole thing….just eat them before u leave the store…..go…run…eat pastries….be free
you are exactly the kind of person i wanna see running a bakery
This is basically the default practice for anyone not living and working in corporate dystopia. If you cannot use or sell something, it’s worthless to you. If something is worthless to you but someone else has a use for it, you let them take it away; you get the worthless thing disposed of for free, which effectively is the best value you’re ever going to get out of the otherwise worthless thing, and you also get to network with a potential contact or just generate a bit of goodwill.
You see it all the time in small business. If a construction company has a bunch of useless bits of warped lumber cut at odd lengths, they’re not going to bother disposing of it themselves if someone wants it for firewood. You got your own truck? Great, it’s yours, saves us the gas and labour costs of hauling it away.
Food destruction is one of the worst symptoms of a broken, inefficient, oligarchic economy. It’s actually wasting labour (and therefore money) to destroy something that is worth no money to its owner, on the presumption that someone, somewhere, will be desperate enough in its absence to buy something else. It’s dubious policy at best even from a ruthlessly pragmatic standpoint, and from all other perspectives it’s basically nihilistic insanity.
why are moms so afraid of Doom turning their kids into devil-worshippers. like, Doom has a pretty strong anti-demon message to it
One of the devs of the original 1993 game is a mormon with that exact position.
That would be Sandy Petersen.
Nice
“You kill demons to save the World.”
“That’s devil worship.”
“Lady….you cut in half demons with a chainsaw. It’s not worshipping anything but the chainsaws frankly.”
Terry Pratchett’s view on Doom:
“Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil… prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon…”
You know all those posts about ways to make it easier to tell your mean inner voice to shut up? Like “imagine they’re an annoying kid on x-box” or “imagine they’re trump” or “give them an annoying name” etc.
If those things work for you don’t read on. If they don’t, though, and telling them to shut up doesn’t make your self criticism go away, it just makes it challenge you and spiral further into upsetting thoughts—
I really recommend looking into Internal Family Systems therapy.
Instead of being about shutting up your inner critical voice, you listen to it and figure out what part of you is saying that and why, and then you address the root causes of those fears and insecurities
For example, say you have the thought “ugh I look disgusting today” and telling that voice to shut up might make it just fire back with “I’m repulsive, I’m worthless, I should die” and get progressively more extreme and negative
An IFS model might identify that voice as a Part that sees your physical body as an objectified signifier of your worth. You can then address the Part and ask “who taught you that?” or “what are you afraid will happen if you like your body? Did someone hurt you for your body? Do you think if you hurt yourself first they won’t have reason to hurt you? Maybe you trying to hurt yourself is actually you wanting to protect yourself from a greater harm from someone else. Maybe you just want to be safe. That’s okay, you deserve to feel safe. And I have other ways to feel safe now besides self harm, I’ve learned new things to do. Let’s do those.”
Then you’ve made that part feel addressed so it settles down and let’s you take care of it instead of getting louder and more defensive and agitated. So the voice in your head will stop being cruel and find healthier ways to address its fears.
And of course, this is really a strategy for you to confront the fears beneath your self hatred and accept and work through them instead of trying to suppress them with more anger and self hatred at having those fears in the first place.
replying is how you make friends! reply to anything you want and be friendly. don’t make rude jokes if you’re not friends already though!
quote retweeting is a no-no. when you “retweet with a comment” it’s not liked by content creators because it makes a new tweet out of their tweet and they don’t get the likes and retweets they would get if you’d just retweeted it straight up. if you want to comment on a retweet, reply to it or post a new tweet starting with “LRT” which stands for “last retweet” (it’s fine to quote retweet dumb memes and so on.)
you can make your tweets private. this means no one but your followers will be able to see what you post and no one will be able to retweet your content. you can switch back and forth between private and public at will. some people make a separate private account to tweet personal stuff and let mutuals follow it only. it’s a good way to keep things separate.
what is privatter? privatter is a third party web app that content creators can allow to be attached to their twitter. it lets them tweet content that they can make exclusive to logged in users, followers, mutuals, or a specific list of users. as long as you are logged in to twitter and fall into the intended category, you’ll be able to see it.
you can mute people you follow. (and those you don’t, ofc.) you can also mute words and phrases and entire conversations. if you mute someone you follow and they reply to you, that reply will still show up in your notifications. it’s a good way to keep the peace!
you can limit notifications to people who follow you or to mutuals. (notifications from people you follow will still show up regardless of which option you’ve selected.)
miscellaneous tips and warnings: if you accidentally unfollow and refollow someone, it won’t show up in their notifications as long as it’s within a couple minutes. no more accidental stuff. everyone can see who everyone follows so watch out. people will know if you unfollow. if you want to report someone and want them gone forever, report a tweet where they used a curse word. screenshotting tweets for harassment is a no-no and can get you banned. don’t be lame. don’t be a dick. vaguing others is generally really bad form and so is complaining about content within a fandom you’re in. use the mute tools at your disposal and don’t be a spoiler. you won’t come back from a rep like that and everyone sees everything.
that’s it! happy tweeting!!
how do i keep all my content together on twitter?
threads are your best friend!! you make a tweet with your commission info and links and so on and pin it to the top of your page. then reply to that tweet with a copy and pasted link to the tweet where you posted the art/fic/etc you want to not lose. reply to that new tweet with the next piece of artwork and so on. you can also make a unique hashtag for your content to use when you post, so that when you search that hashtag later you’re able to see just your art. good luck!
Ooooo! Reblogging because I recently made a Twitter (for easy-to-guess reasons), so these are some useful tips!
Plot Designing 