La Donna Errante

“Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) wasn’t quite ready for showtime.

The conspiracy theorist lawmaker was given the boot from a touring production of “Beetlejuice” in Denver on Sunday for being disruptive, according to multiple reports.

The Denver Post said three theatergoers complained that Boebert and her companion were vaping, singing, recording the performance and causing a disturbance at the Buell Theatre.”

What a f—king clown and total embarrassment to Colorado and America. If you watch the video she’s clearly drunk and mouthing off. Of course there was the obligatory “do you know who I am” and “I’m going to call the mayor.” You can also see all the support staff at the theater smirking and laughing at the drunken whore as she’s being escorted to the door. The footage also shows her singing, waving her arms, laughing hysterically, and her new “boyfriend” twirling her at least three times. Yes boyfriend, that’s not her hubby “Peepshow” Boebert who she is divorcing because the whole country learned of him being a pedo who beat her (even while pregnant) and the kids (the oldest of which is making her a grandma at 36).

This is what happens when the GQP, via the Koch family and Ted Cruz, takes skanks and scumbags straight out of the trailer park and installs them into Congress as paid crisis actors.

I’m not a misogynist or an elitist, characterizations of her are accurate, as are those of her family, friends, and colleagues. Certain people don’t belong in certain professions. She literally went from the McDonald’s drive through straight to Congress. After dropping out of high school and getting a “compassionate” GED on her 4th attempt.

Sorry but high level politics requires a background in law, history, economics, political science, etc. There’s no “real world” life experiences that can prepare you for the incredibly complex machinations of representing 365 million people. It’s not a joke and seats shouldn’t be filled by clowns. The Koch family and their political think tanks funneled $137,000 dollars to her via the Ted Cruz Victory Campaign to get her elected. Ted delivered the check in person to her at a discrete hotel where Koch operatives claim she performed sexual favors in exchange.

There are many documented screw-ups in her life and many, many allegations of more. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Even with this latest incident on tape and documented she will be defended by MAGAts who just want to give the finger to the establishment and “own the libs” no matter what the cost to them and the country.

Set aside for a moment what a piece of trash Boebert clearly is. Set aside all of the disgusting, childish, ignorant, fascist, racist shit she's done in just a handful of months. Set all that aside and just look at how thoroughly unqualified she is to hold public office. She would not be able to manage a restaurant during a busy lunch. She barely has a high school level education. She's clearly stupid, entitled, arrogant, incurious. She has no respect of history or even a basic understanding of how governance works. And she is EXACTLY who the GOP wants in positions of power, so she can just be a puppet for Trump, and future versions of Trump. She isn't the first, she won't be the last. But come on, Colorado. Get your shit together. You're embarrassing and imperiling the nation.

Colorado is working on it you guys! Boebert nearly lost her seat in the midterms—it was sooooooo close. A little more investment from the national democratic party and she’d have been out

I have been reading a bit on the OTW elections and the whole Tiffany G thing, but most of all, I've been reading comments from people supporting Tiffany saying that she just wants to clear AO3 from all the CP (child pornography) content and I don't know who needs to hear this but:

If someone comes to a predominantly QUEER space (like AO3) and tells you that censorship is necessary to eradicate CP... it's not actually CP they want to eradicate...

I've seen this type of discourse about Pride and about queer literature and queer movies and queer communities. It's a tried and true technique of the right and conservative movements.

First, they say there is a DANGER to the community through CP and they conflate the actual threat of CP in the community (we all know someone who thinks that writing a love story between two characters who are 16 is CP...), and make you believe that censorship is the only way to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. And since most people are (rightly) mind-bogled at having to explain that of course they don't support CP content, they bow down and accept the censorship for the greater good, without anyone actually trying to have a conversation about what qualifies as CP (which needs to, you know, actually involve real children and not fictional characters who are 17 and losing their virginity with their crush in a Mature-rated story about high school football and first love based on the author's own experience of losing their virginity at 17 to their crush in high school).

Then, they tell you that there are other forms of DISTURBING CONTENT, and what they really mean is porn that THEY find disturbing, for ex, (and I kid you not, I have seen comments like that) porn featuring disabled characters, which they consider to encourage the exploitation of vulnerable individuals, or BDSM porn (which supposedly encourages violence and lack of consent), or rough p*rn, or any kind of porn that isn't two (preferably white and skinny) able-bodied people doing it missionary style while lovingly gazing in each other's eyes. SO TO PROTECT VIEWERS, that needs to be banned as well.

And then, they tell you that even that sanitized version of porn is still porn and that people under 18 or under 21 or under whatever age they consider too young to view anything sexual regardless of the fact that not all countries have the same law about the age of maturity, should be free to surf the site without having to *gasp* filter out properly tagged works. So TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN, every explicit content is censored.

And then finally, when all that is left is a sanitized, white-washed, ableist, puritan type of content featuring General-Audience approved gay works of two nice men or two nice women holding hands and chastely kissing each other on the lips... Well guess what? :) CHILDREN SHOULD NOT BE EXPOSED TO QUEER CONTENT SO WE NEED TO BAN THAT AS WELL, and since we've basically done purge after purge before and there are still a handful of people on the website, well surely they won't mind/care anymore, will they?

It's not just a slippery slope, it's something that has been done time and again, and that is why censorship on AO3 will never, never have a positive outcome.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Okay, but, while I agree 100% with everything OP has said, they're missing one glaring, screaming clarification that all of the posts about this I've seen keep missing, and I need to say it.

There is no actual "CP" in AO3.

First of all, do not call it CP. It is not called CP. Every advocacy and regulatory body and TOS on the fucking internet does not call it CP.

CP stands for Child Pornography.

This was the lingo of the 90's. This was the term chosen in time because it produces a very visceral, upsetting reaction in people. It's a term meant to induce disgust.

It is also a term that carries very, very, very unfortunate implications.

It is 2022, and we have all as society agreed that Child Pornography doesn't exist, per se, because "pornography" describes an industry that adults participate in. Ideally, willingly, but there's abuses and excesses, like in all industries, where people are coerced. Pornography is like retail: some people do it because they enjoy it, some people do it because they have to pay bills, some people do it because someone is coercing them into it.

But the keyword is "participate".

Pornography is made by adults, for adults, and as such, all adults have a level of agency in it.

CSAM, or Child Sexual Abuse Material, is the proper term to refer to what people think of, when you say "CP". We changed the terminology, because children have no agency. It is not pornography. It is material explicitly recording and displaying abuse. Children cannot consent to sexual activity.

Children cannot participate, the way adults do, in pornography.

The other thing, to keep in mind, is that AO3 does not host CSAM. At all. It is against their TOS already. No website with servers in the US, or in a country with any kind of economic or diplomatic relations with the US, does. Because it's against the law. See the fiasco with the AO3 volunteers that were sent actual CSAM materials and the way AO3 handled that.

AO3 does not host any kind of CSAM.

When you get that context, you realize that any cries to remove material from the archive are not being done in good faith. And therefore any and all replies to those, are pointless.

The hot button material that people are upset about are fictional works depicting fictional minors engaged in any level of sexual activity, thus tagged "Underage"; and specifically, a subjection of those works, that are also fictional works depicting fictionalized versions of real people, thus tagged "RPF".

Whether you think this material should or shouldn't be allowed in the Archive, is one thing. (I personally don't particularly find it to my taste and would not be super heartbroken if AO3 decided to remove it, but that doesn't matter, because it is allowed and fits within the guidelines and falls under the mission statement of AO3, and has since inception, so every single person who is currently using AO3 has, at least in theory, accepted that. If people tell you "they didn't know" this or try to frame it like it's something new? Those people are either lying to your face or idiots who didn't read the TOS before joining the site.)

But you cannot, in good conscience, call this "CSAM" or related terms. You cannot. It is literally and explicitly not.

The reason CSAM is illegal and bad and terrible and consistently accepted as one of the worst possible things to exist in the world, is because its existence depends on the abuse of a child. Its very existence is confirmation that a crime has been committed.

The point is not that CSAM is "disgusting". Even though it is, 100% and if you don't think it is, you're a fucking idiot. The problem with CSAM is the inherent harm its creation requires. That's why it's illegal basically everywhere. That's why every TOS is written to exclude its presence explicitly.

The content currently in AO3, "Underage RPF", does not match that definition. Does not cause the harm that CSAM does. The morality of Underage RPF can be up for debate. The actual/potential harm of Underage RPF can be up for debate.

But you can't have any of those conversations if you don't start from a clear understanding that it is not "CP", that "CP" is not even a "real" term anymore and should instead be considered a red flag, used primarily to antagonize and demonize the opposition.

OP is absolutely right in tracking how accusations of this nature have been used historically to target and censor and destroy queer communities. But OP is also playing into the game by not rejecting the mislabeling of content, because THAT too is what they want. When they accuse AO3 of hosting CP, and you skip clarifying that, no, actually, AO3 does not host ANY CP at all in the first place, you've already lost. You've already handed them the win, because any and all arguments become void. You're defending CP in their eyes, and they will frame it as such. And if you're defending CP, then anything you say is irrelevant. Or worse, if you're defending CP, that means everything else you're defending (queer people, freedom of expression, writers, FICTION, etc.) is also as suspect and as inherently bad as the CP.

Otherwise you wouldn't defend it in tandem.

The "Democrats should have codified Roe" argument is a bullshit hypothetical and requires a lot of rewriting history and ignoring a ton of other factors.

I originally put these in the comments of @thebreakfastgenie's ask they got about codifying Roe:

At no point has there ever been a pro-choice majority in government, much less a filibuster-proof pro-choice majority which would have been able to pass a bill codifying Roe into law aka providing federal protection for abortion rights.

Casey in 1992 both opened the door to the incremental chipping away of abortion rights (by allowing limitations and shifting the hurdle that needed to be cleared for those limitatiions being placed for the first time since Roe was decided) but also affirmed the original decision and for the most part it was considered a settled issue.

Roe was a 7-2 decision, and Casey was a 5-4 decision (Casey was an incredibly fractured decision, with justices concurring and dissenting all over the place but broadly speaking there was a 5-4 majority in favor).

It's not until the later Obama years, following the tea party takeover in 2010 and the Citizens United decision opening the door to more money in politics and more pressure on the judiciary and then the 2015 SCOTUS seat stealing by McConnell and then Trump winning in 2016 that you see an increase in the right-wing hijacking of the judiciary and an increase in abortion restrictions (designed to get before a sympathetic Court and overturn Roe).

There has literally never been an opportunity to "codify Roe" that would have succeeded.

Not to gatekeep Jane Austen, but I don’t think you’re allowed to adapt Persuasion until you’ve lived years of your life trying to appease others, watching opportunities pass you by, and then realize you have to grow and move on somehow in an environment where others who’ve surpassed you already thrive.

That’s a very specific story.

Imagine trying to make Sense and Sensibility without ever having had to put your own hopes and dreams on the shelf in order to provide for others in a cold, new reality.

Some stories are not meant to be fun and quirky and silly. Some stories are meant to be painful.

Beautiful, and still with a happy ending, but painful nonetheless.

Yeah, sorry, we still don’t actually know 100% what causes SIDS. The enzyme found is a potential (!) biomarker, which can indicate a vulnerability but in no way definitively proves that this is the singular cause for SIDS. There are several limitations to the study, including the samples being approx. 2 years old, and more importantly, that we don’t know how many people who are healthy/don’t die of SIDS have this abnormality. This is a cool finding and definitely one that will be the basis of a lot of important research in the future, but it’s overblown and inaccurate to claim that we have finally found the singular cause of SIDS. More importantly, I see people claiming that now we can stop telling people only to let their babies sleep on their backs, without toys, etc. These are well-established recommendations whose implementation caused a notable decline in SIDS cases worldwide. Please don’t put the cart in front of the horse with this one.

Original thread:

https://mobile.twitter.com/DianaMiller5/status/1522278413096132609?cxt=HHwWgoC53deJnKAqAAAA

Note, I am finding these threads on the twitter feeds of ICU nurses who are now dreading the horrors that Roe falling will bring to their hospitals. This, on top of the horrors that they’ve seen and continue to see because of the pandemic. They were already exhausted and hanging by a thread.

“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).

“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.

Blood is what now?

It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing

#are you telling me#humans are just sentient aquariums? 

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.

Thank you that’s…very disturbing

It’s not my fault you’re human.

Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.

You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.

#/blood is imitation seawater/ is the part that’s confusing 

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

And that’s what a human is!

Well, there’s another few steps, of course.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.

there are, apparently, many benefits to being a marine biologist

One of the things that I think gets glossed over in the lesson of how recovery isn't linear, especially for spoonies, is the knowledge that recovery takes energy. Recovery is work. This is important because sometimes you're directing energy away from fun things or from work or your hobbies in order to recover, and so you may have a time in which you feel better but are mad at yourself, because you're still not being productive. Why can't you be productive, if you feel better? Why don't you have energy for your hobbies? Well, because you're using it right now. You haven't yet gotten to the state where you have a surplus to direct back to your hobbies. There is a gap you can fall into, here.

Be gentle with yourself. It doesn't help you to be upset about energy you don't have. It won't help you to overextend. Keep taking your meds, even if it's tiring to keep to a schedule. Keep going to your doctor's appointments. Rest. Eat. Drink water. Those things are important uses of your energy. It's okay that you don't have any to spare right now. Keep it up, and eventually you will. This is an affirmation and a reminder to myself, too. It'll be alright.

something that absolutely no progressive wants to engage with: the Democratic Party’s policy platform (and the voting record of its congressional reps) is actually well to the left of its median voter, and this has a lot of worrying implications

this is not a criticism, mind you: for years now, Republicans have gone well to the right of their median voter (by playing on culture war bullshit more than substantive policy) and been amply rewarded by their base, and as their base has gotten more insane they’ve become more emboldened. it’s a very effective feedback loop

if Democrats are punished for going left of their median voter, it’s really not going to matter that some people think it’s punishment for “not going far ENOUGH.” that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works. if an organization is repeatedly punished for setting a specific course, they will tack away because they are getting nowhere! because the only faction even INTERESTED in that direction can’t be bothered to show up!

and right now Democrats are absolutely getting shellacked for (1) honestly for doing anything, our political media loves theatre & despises attempts at real governance because it’s boring, and (2) being left of most of the country. progressives are insanely unwilling to admit that this is still a deeply conservative country, and that “normie centrist liberals” are nowhere near a solid majority much less people who consider themselves progressive / leftists

if you look at the party’s platforms over the last ten years, the Democrats have taken a MAJOR leftward shift by any conceivable measure. getting a major political party to shift this way means that you have had an impact, that you are being heard, that you are beginning to win. but istg that nobody loves defeat the way that leftists do, because the prevailing opinion is to despair & give up & cede electoral power to the rightwing.

you’re gonna give up NOW? you just fucking got started and you’re having a measurable impact at a CRUCIAL historical juncture, and now you want to give up because you didn’t immediately win at everything completely and forever?

what is the reasoning here? what is this commitment to defeatism? why the total lack of faith in achieving your own goals? you have to have a little more gumption if, as part of a minority political faction, you really are committed to seeing actual major changes

Yes!

If you’re going to demand intense, leftward change in the Democratic Party, then you have to show up and vote people in!!

If you demand change within the party, but then don’t show up and keep those members doing the changing actually in power, then all you’ve done is tossed another W to the republicans who will be more than happy to see Roe gutted, the Muslim ban reinstated, tax loopholes widened, gay marriage overturned…

also: if YOU don’t recognize and protect the significant leftward shift in the Democratic Party, it’s your perfect right to make that choice and it’s your perfect right to sniff that it’s still not leftward enough for you, but guess what?

Conservatives have recognized this shift and are devoting their full energies to squash it. So where do you think that this is headed? If you’re the only one in the room who refuses to acknowledge what you’ve begun to win because it’s not a “good enough” win, and who won’t work to cement what you’ve gained already or enable your future victories, where does that leave you when your enemies pursue their goals and they actually have fire in their bellies?

Do you want to protect current victories and enable further movement towards your goals (civil rights, labor issues, environmental issues & climate change policy, healthcare) or are you completely ceding power to right wingers who have actually been very very clear about where they stand & what they will do?

What was the point of SUCCESSFULLY pushing Dems significantly left if you’re not going to follow through? This is what I really don’t understand about the American left, compared to the hardline right wingers. There’s this complete refusal to acknowledge that as a passionate minority faction, you MUST have some gumption & commitment to drag the country in your direction when most people don’t agree with you.

The right-wing has no trouble identifying and pursing power; the left will sniff about “electoralism” and “normie centrists” and then act shocked that the fucking West Wing political fantasy television show isn’t real, and elections have consequence, and there will be no 11th hour Hail Mary saves for Roe v. Wade because that was decided in 2016. I just don’t get it. If the left can’t even identify political power much less commit to pursuing and retaining any, what exactly are you hoping to accomplish…? ARE you hoping to accomplish anything?

M*A*S*H + Blowin' in the Wind (suggested by @thebreakfastgenie)

Theyre right and they should say it.

I actually think the real advantage tumblr has over other websites is the ability of "reblogging" to create posts with contributions from multiple users. This allows people to build on others' posts, whether that's derailing them with a terrible joke, drawing the scenario proposed as a comic, answering the question posed originally in lively essay format, or rewriting the previous interaction as a scene in Shakespearean iambic pentameter.

This is also why Tumblr is hard to make profitable. Individual users have relatively little power to create good content. It's interactions between users that actually creates the good content, and therefore, no one involved in the good stuff on Tumblr can really claim to "own" it or be the "creator."

Posts have to navigate through Tumblr to pick up the people that can add to them in a constructive way, and then when users interact, the whole interaction can spread across the website as a new evolution of the content. There's no way to simplify this process.

Theres a whole ecosystem running here. It's not as simple as Creators and Consumers, and you can't simplify it to that. That's not how ART works, let alone posts. There's symbiosis. The users that do the nitrogen fixation aren't the ones photosynthesizing. The detritivores can't also be the predators. The "rappers doing normal shit blog" has a different niche than the person that asks why Lil Wayne has socks on in the jacuzzi, who has a different niche than the person who says "those are his hooves, you bitch!"

It's like bioavailability, you see. The user that responds "Those are his hooves, you bitch" is like a predator on a high trophic level, unable to directly feed on producers, needing primary consumers to convert the post into a form that makes a punch line possible.

This is what I love about Tumblr. It feels more like discussing a common matter with the people you meet while out for a walk than trying to hold a conversation with twenty people at once in a crowded room

I have seen a lot of these "how Tumblr works"-posts going around lately, and I think this one says it really well. I'm not necessarily here for the original post but for the snowball effect of a reblog chain that hopefully follows

College dorms in the late 90s early 2000s had poster boards everywhere and everyone stuck random notes on, some that continued a conversation. Tumblr makes me think of college posterboards.

Tumblr is improv. We’re constantly yes-anding each other.

I knew a linguist once who did a study on conversations in bathroom graffiti and that’s something else tumblr conversations remind me of. 

humans are an essential part of the ecosystem. nearly every ecosystem on earth had humans as an essential part of its function. the earth would be worse off than before if we were gone suddenly overnight. send tweet

I don’t remember dinosaurs drilling for oil and dumping trash everywhere…

very gently: yes. some humans have been doing destruction recently. yes, some humans are living in unsustainable ways. yes, the world is suffering for the actions of the humans who exploit the natural world.

however.

this has not been the case for the vast majority of time. this is not currently the case for many people on the earth right now. we evolved alongside earth’s ecosystems, as they evolved alongside us. we are part of it. we are embedded in the world. we have never been seperate from it, and the idea that we are – that our actions somehow could have no consequences for the world at large – is the mindset that allowed the current crisis to reach where it is.

it’s. hard to truly get a sense of the scale of humans’ existence on the planet– under the readmore i’ve drawn out a rough timeline for you. it is very long, so i’ll put it under the cut.

suffice it to say: humans, homo sapiens, have existed on the earth for 315,000 years. we did not invent agriculture until 11,500 years ago. the industrial revolution, the drilling for oil and dumping plastic? that has happened only in the last 250 years. 

we are part of the world. we are in the world. some of us have very, very recently forgotten this fact. but we are remembering, and remembering quickly.

the earth needs us. it needs us to fix the things we’ve gotten wrong, yes. but it also needs us to be humans. to hunt, to burn, to care for the forests and the fields and the grasslands. it has always needed us. we are not interlopers here. we belong. we have simply forgotten our manners.

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+ op’s tags bc i think they are very important