Flyting

The thing younger fans need to understand is that 'content creator' and 'consumer' are social media marketing terms that did not exist as labels in fandom spaces until the past decade.

As a side effect of a lot of fan interaction happening on social media, you started reshaping what a fandom IS in order to fit within what a social media platform wants you to be.

See, social media platforms exist to advertise to you. That's it. That is how they make money. It's their reason for existing. You -- your attention, your time -- are the product they sell to advertisers for profit.

Social media companies divide their users into 'content creators' and 'content consumers'. That's where those terms come from. They're technical terms that originated in the Twitter corporate offices.

'Content creator' is the term for people who make things -- videos, funny posts, thoughtful comments, art, etc -- that other people want to look at. 'Consumers' are the people who use the platform because they want to look at that thing, and end up looking at a lot of ads in the process.

I loathe, loathe, LOATHE how we have taken to applying the terms 'content' and 'consumer' to ourselves outside of their business model. You do not exist to make money for a social media company. A drawing someone made is not 'content' for you to 'consume'.

A fandom is an informal social group. That's all. It's you and a bunch of other people who all like the same thing, and sometimes you enjoy the thing together. You don't have to create anything. You don't 'consume content'. You are hanging out with other people.

Stop forcing yourself into their boxes.

This is a cranberry bog (unflooded) it’s how cranberries grow. Once they’re ripe, the blog is flooded and the cranberries harvested.

His farm was on the leading edge of kinda using organic/sustainable pest control methods, and one of the things that they did to keep insect damage down was that they encouraged wolf spiders to live in the cranberry field, to eat the bugs. 

This was all fine and good until they flooded the bog. Now, you don’t just like flood the bog and then go around it in a boat or whatever. No, you use hip waders to get in there and put the big floaty things where they go and get all the berries and such.

Well when you’re in the bog in hip waders, that makes you the tallest thing. Wolf spiders can swim a bit, but they don’t like it, so they’re, quite understandably, looking to climb out of the water onto a tall thing.

So yeah the first interview question he always asked potential cranberry bog harvester hires was “are you cool with spiders?”