My Life is Disneyland...

me: yeah, i posted on tumblr

publisher: .........tumblr?

me: that's where the gays are.

publisher: And what is your marketing strategy on... tumblr?

me: idk, i shitpost at 2am?

publisher: .....and it works?

me: depends on what the gays find funny at that point in time.

publisher: Could I have a link to your tumblr?

me: .......absolutely not.

publisher: I've been looking into tumblr, have you thought of using Blaze to promote your book?

me: NO

publisher: But it seems like an efficient way to get this in front of more eyes-

me: people on tumblr hate Blaze.

publisher: There is no algorithm and you can't pay to promote a post? I don't understand how anyone advertises anything on tumblr.

me: That's the best part. They don't. They can't.

(trying to make him understand that we do not control the attention. We just have to show something shiny and gay enough and if people are interested, they'll reblog.)

MORE

It's perfectly reasonable that I have decided, based on ambient cultural information, that Ready Player One will not be my jam and I'm not going to read it. What that means, though, is that I have very little information about Ready Player One. I am not an authority on Ready Player One. If there's a discussion of the character development or worldbuilding or plot structure in Ready Player One, I can listen, but I can't really contribute, because I have not read it and thus am missing quite a lot of information about it.

"Made with the help of ai" here is fascinating. Why'd it take a picture of young thug that's a well known meme? Also why'd it make them white? Who saw this and went "yep, this really screams «high quality journalism»"

Did this person (who turned out to be a trans man) say, ‘actually I’m a guy’ and move on? No. They WENT OFF about how this other person in the comments had ‘misgendered me’, like this understandable wrong guess was a malicious act. The other person apologised and attempted to move on, but oh no, that couldn’t happen. This was a clear indication that the other person was evil, daring to misgender a trans person (again, this was a completely unintentional wrong guess that was immediately apologised for and not repeated), and not only that, the OP was evil for ‘allowing their followers to misgender me’ (the OP had not been involved in this conversation at all, nor was their any indication over whether either participant followed them. It was two random Tumblr users having a discussion in the notes of this one post. Nothing to do with OP). This proved that the OP and this person supporting them were evil transphobes, see, and proved that ‘all women are negatively affected by gender policing’ was an evil transphobic thing to say and shouldn’t be talked about.

Was any of this discussion remotely useful for any purpose? No. It was just a derail of a legitimate discussion by someone deciding to invent new transphobia and misogyny so they could use invented victimisation in their personal game of oppression olympics, instead of usefully discussing the actual transphobia and misogyny that the post was about. Someone using their identity as a trap to try to bully random people on the internet via ‘I think Coolsville sucks’-style invented attacks when there are very real transphobes and misogynists out there to focus on instead. All it did was make a bunch of people -- including the person stirring up the drama! -- very angry for no reason.

When I was "under 18" I had a job and friends from different parts of town and options for transportation. I volunteered at a food bank. I had an income and the desire to spend it. and I would have been told to leave if I had the audacity to go hang out in a community space without a grown up.

My parents made the point that teens often cause a Ruckus which can be unpleasant to be around. which is true but 1) adults are just as capable of being a public nuisance and 2) if they can enforce this rule, surely they can enforce rules such as "no swearing" or "no loud music" or "no roughhousing" or whatever else they're afraid will happen if a teenager goes out in public.

I grew up reading a lot of pop science books from the library can you tell

Yes, they commit pop science crimes. But even with that taken into consideration, Aspen's well-written and sympathetic enough that I, notorious pop-science hater, don't even care about that. They read as deeply burnt out and ambivalent about their discipline, yes--but that's such a fair and understandable reaction in their situation that it adds to the verisimilitude, not reduces it. And their observer's eye is on point--and that's what matters, to me, at least.

I cannot express to you how FAST it has gone. I grew up in a world that does not exist now. We're starting on the path to reverse it, globally. You might not know how much solar has EXPLODED in the last decade or two. It's gone from a side thing, a weirdo novelty that was just Not Viable... to whole countries investing in infrastructure. but we have to keep fighting big oil and fascism everywhere we can in order to keep on this road to a new better less scorching burning earth.

Contrast that with several weeks of snow that I knew in my childhood. It was sometimes enough that workplaces and schools had to close. And nowhere as many heatwaves, and nowhere as long, as the past couple years.