there has been A Sound for the last three hours (since 7:30 am) and I have no idea what it is but it is making me homicidal, on top of exhausted and deeply confused. sounds like construction work, maybe? it’s not chainsaw sounds but in the family. it is not someone mowing their lawn because I live downtown, you have to go back a block before you hit lawn (there’s not a lot of downtown, and also there’s not enough grass for anyone to mow their lawn yet, not to mention lawnmower sounds are distinctive). it is rumbly and buzzy and making me nuts. it will also periodically stop and I’ll go “finally, now I can go back to sleep before my alarm goes off” and then it starts up again. anyway I am up because I have to go teach at 11 but also I got like four hours of sleep (because I went to sleep late and already knew I wasn’t going to get enough sleep, but I thought I’d get more). I also live in an old stone building that throws sound weirdly so I have literally no idea where it’s coming from. not anywhere I can see from my windows which doesn’t mean much since it’s an apartment. louder in the main part of my apartment than in my bedroom (which faces the street and so implies it isn’t on the street). it also started exactly at 7:30 am.
Title: The River Running Fandom: Torchwood Author:badly_knitted Characters: Ianto, Jack. Rating: PG Word Count: 1020 Summary: Jack has brought his husband to see something spectacular, but so far, Ianto isn’t impressed. Spoilers: Nada. Set in my Ghost of a Chance ‘Verse. Warnings: None needed. Written For: Challenge 510: River. Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood or any of the characters.
I think it could be cool to put together a board of the top Tumblristas in the world, that could see previews of what’s coming up and advise on strategic direction. Who should be on it?
I am going to get this out of my system upfront so that I can explain everything that’s wrong with this idea in a clearheaded way: This is a bad idea, it feels incredibly gross, and it reinforces my impression that you do not understand this website at all. It is indescribably frustrating and infuriating. It makes me want to vomit, and that’s even before I get to “Tumblrista”.
Now then.
A key takeaway from the massive amount of almost universally negative feedback to the reblog change should have been: Tumblr users do not, as a rule, care about clout. We do not want quantified “credit” for how good our addition to a post is, and we don’t want influencers who are anointed as more important than everyone else because they are popular. That’s not what we do here; it’s never been what we do here. If we wanted that, we could get it from ANY other social media. The fact that we’re here instead makes it pretty clear that clout is not important to us, and in fact is actively repulsive to us. Anointing particular Tumblr users as “top Tumblristas” and putting them on an “advisory board” that gets special access to new features and the opportunity to give feedback on them would constitute the exact type of hierarchy we despise.
Furthermore: When a corporate entity proposes an “advisory board of power users”, what they’re actually doing is trying to pre-empt wider user pushback against executive decisions, by creating the illusion of user buy-in while using social pressure to enforce decisions that have already been made. The actual reasoning behind selecting “top” users is because they are popular, which suggests they have influence over other users. The idea is, rather than convincing the community as a whole, you convince a smaller subset of influential people, and then they convince everyone else. Again, this depends on a kind of hierarchy and clout-based “influencer” system that we don’t have and don’t want.
As for the “top users” board themselves: By choosing someone and telling them “you’re a Top User and you get to be on the special committee and have special privileges,” you are giving them something (supposedly) desirable: social status, (the appearance of) influence and power, etc. And you can take it away. That means now you have power over them. If they don’t want to lose their special status, they will avoid displeasing you. Which means they are less likely to give you significant pushback, and they are more willing to pressure others to go along with what you want to do. That makes them incredibly useful to corporate, but completely undermines their supposed role as a voice for the community. We see this already with influencers on every other platform, who become de facto spokespeople for corporations and brands and stop meaningfully criticizing them out of fear of losing the access that is critical to their status.
I’m not saying all this because I think it’s news to the CEO of a tech company. I think you know all of that perfectly well already. I’m saying it because I think you assume we don’t know it, and because some people might not. But I have played this game before and I know how it goes. It never benefits the community. It is always a way to control the community.
You do not need an advisory board to get feedback about site changes. The community is demonstrably perfectly able and willing to speak for themselves individually. If you really want to know what everyone thinks, you have to ask everyone, not a handpicked group of influencers who are under pressure to play along.
making the radical claim “11 year old children should be taught how to make extremely simple food” has resulted in people making arguments like “I wasnt allowed to plug in electronics until I was 16 and I think this is super normal actually” and “children dont know what ratios are so its unfair to expect them to be able to comprehend the idea of adding equal amounts rice and water to a rice cooker” and I gotta say originally I thought maybe I was being too judgy but now I feel very secure in my opinion because what the fuck
Children might not know what ratios are in the sense of 1:1 notation, but they are more than capable of understanding ‘you have to use the same amount of water and rice otherwise it goes wrong’.
In addition to this, cooking is an excellent way to teach children scaling and ratio in Real Life.
“Children don’t understand-” AND THAT’S WHY IT IS YOUR JOB TO TEACH THEM????? LIKE HELLO??? THEY CAN LEARN??????
So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?
I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we’re acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it’s actually meant to do.
OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.
A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.
Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.
…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.
I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:
Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)
Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?
Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?
Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?
Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?
These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.
In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”
even if you feel confident you are not and have never been in a cult, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the signs, just in case one begins to sneak up on you in the future.
ALT
Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.
Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.
This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco’s International Hotel.
People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.
Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.
Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!
It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.
One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…
This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.
If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.
“This can’t possibly be a cult, because when I joined it was a leftist political org and there’s never been a single instance where it suddenly changed” is literally the exact logic that kept people in Jonestown until it was too late.
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
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Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
I’ve seen people comment that Pomni’s torture scenario was kind of weak compared to the others, and that it could be because she hasn’t been in the circus as long, thus Caine can’t personalize her punishment as well.
And even if he’s technically using their traumas to hurt them, I don’t think that was his main intention. I think he was “replying” to their criticisms.
Pomni: We think your ideas suck!
Including Gummigoo, Pomni?
Zooble: Pathetic! You’re like a child! What kind of all-powerful being has such fragile ego?
How can someone, whose body perfectly encapsulates their mind and is fully customizable, not feel satisfied yet? How many options do you need? How vain can you be, Zooble?
First of all, I know that Zooble most likely suffers from dysphoria, and Caine focusing the torture scenario on that was a massive dick move on his part, especially when Zooble had shared their insecurities about their body in a previous episode.
However, in that same episode, Caine shared with Zooble his own insecurities.
Caine: Making adventures is my art! It’s all I exist to do! All I am… good at. (…) … w-what you’re saying could imply that I’m bad at the only thing I’m good at, and that…
I’m just saying that he probably took Zooble’s criticism as a low blow of its own and he made it personal.
Ragatha: You never let us feel like we’re at home.
Which home? Yours, Ragatha?
Gangle: You discourage us from thinking outside the box and doing things our way!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they made the Cat more of an actual character with stuff to do and relationships with the rest of the crew, but there is a unique charm to series I/II Cat just kind of being there in the background, doing his own thing and occasionally chiming in with an unhelpful comment
The story of Cats is that in the 1930s, the famous poet T.S. Eliot wrote a book of cutesy little cat-themed poems for his godchildren
And then 40 years later, Andrew Lloyd Webber found a lost cat poem that T.S. Eliot had cut from the cat book for being too sad for children, and ALW was like “woahhh. A cat….that’s sad. That’s deep, man. I wanna make a musical out of this”
So the producer assigned to the project was like “okay, I guess you could maybe read these cat poems as a satire of 1930s British society? We could probably do something sort of interesting with that, I’m thinking a cast of about 5 and–”
And ALW was like “no. Forget the satire. Also I want a cast of dozens and the most advanced special effects technology ever seen on stage. I’ve taken out a second mortgage on my house to fund this”
And the producer was like “wh– you– wh– do you even have. a plot”
So ALW got a bunch of actors and writers and artists together and they holed up and did cocaine workshopped for 5 weeks, and at the end of it they emerged and said “the plot is that a bunch of cats are having a dance contest for the right to take a ufo to cat heaven :)”
and then it made 2 billion dollars.
You know how the best genre of rock song is “There’s a Wizard”? CATS is good because it’s two and a half hours straight of “There’s a Cat”, which shares a lot of the same musical DNA.
Though curiously, the “There’s a Cat who is a Wizard” song is actually the worst one in the whole play. It’s not great on its own, but it’s REALLY not done any favors by the song right before it, “There’s a Cat Who Has Done Every Crime Ever And Everyone Is At Least A Little Horny For Him.”
In the future they will invent a way to be in bed and in the shower at the same time with no negative repercussions and it will be history’s most important invention
ALT
It’s for me
(No shade to this person I just thought it was a really funny thing to say in this specific situation)
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