I need a place to post non fandom things lol. Thoughts and misc. not supposed to be cutesy or meaningful or likeable.………………………….I am interested in: semiotics, IPA, literature, dramaturgy.. philosophy… and shit that’s kind of dumb…???
me and my mom bag against the world. I have found so much joy in bringing around items and cards and cameras and books instead of just a phone and keys.
Filofax Holborn pocket organizer in purple which functions as a wallet and calendar
bring back carrying around a deck of cards !! 8 years ago at least one person had a deck of cards with them, now its a short form content wasteland. single handedly bringing back card-game culture in my friend group.
current read: The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
sunbeam bluebird (flipphone) + cheap earbuds
sony DSC-W800 Cyber-shot
cigarette case (only for if im drunk (luv me a drunk ciggie))
pocket sudoku my beloved + little notebook for lists
assorted toiletries & accessories but honorable mentions are: alcohol pads to shoo away nausea, propranolol (if you get test/public speaking anxiety ask ur doctor about it, it has saved my ass so many times by lowering my adrenaline and allowing me to take exams without thinking im going to explode from anxiety) & butterfly hair claw that is too small to be useful in my hair, but great at pinching together the straps of my bag to keep one from falling off my shoulder
lucky charm (minecraft pig in minecart) + icon of the Theotokos
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but i'm a cheerleader (1999)
what a way to go (1964)
strawberry mansion (2021)
the umbrellas of cherbourg (1964)
the grand budapest hotel (2014)
wittgenstein (1993)
barbie (2023)
earth girls are easy (1988)
secretary (2002)
an american in paris (1951)
wicked (2024)
josie and the pussycats (2001)
the young girls of rochefort (1967)
cam (2018)
gentlemen prefer blondes (1953)
terminal usa (1993)
enchanted (2007)
mishima (1985)
blow out (1981)
atomic blonde (2017)
lisa frankenstein (2024)
singin' in the rain (1952)
funny face (1957)
lola (1981)
chelsea girls (1966)
fantasia (1940)
the substance (2024)
pink narcissus (1971)
mean girls (2004)
barbarella (1968)
Yesterday I took the impulsive (but very wise) decision to switch my iPhone for a dumb phone. And it all started with the fact that I was spiraling because a man didn't interact with my posts on Instagram, which is crazy, I am fully aware.
But I am grateful to where this is leading me, because God knew that I would see the irony of my situation through something as stupid as this.
In reality, my reaction to him not interacting with me, was just the tip of the iceberg, it's just a symptom of a disease that's been in me for as long as I can remember.
I think my phone played a role in how I see myself, and it impacted me badly. I was never aware of this, but I was always comparing myself to others, and it’s very subtle.
I live my life through other people’s life, and my brain is confusing the dopamine that I feel from scrolling, with actual real life activities that could also bring me dopamine but in a different way.
What made me do it, is seeing that if you spend just 2 hours a day on your phone, it’s a total spent of 10 years of your life. Are you kidding me??
I always thought that I was wasting my life away for convenience, for the easy way, for that fake sense of community.
I wonder what my life is going to look like without a phone. How will I spend my time? Hopefully by creating more than I consume, or maybe by consuming more mindfully.
I know why life seemed more magical up until I turned 13, it was because I wasn’t being a slave of my phone.
Since I know that not sharing anything with the world will make me feel like there’s a void inside of me, I will use this platform to share whatever I need to share at the moment, because that’s something that I truly enjoy doing.
May God give me boredom, and the ability to create
A while back I downgraded from a semi-recent iPhone to a feature phone (Nokia 2780), which was well and good until I broke it in a confused scrimmage with physics lab equipment. At the time I was so busy I couldn't make myself do anything about it, so now I'm just without a mobile phone. And it's been fine. I actually like it, not being constantly connected to the world, not being constantly available... Of course my circumstances are what makes this doable: I'm living with my parents until the end of the summer and have no job that requires I have a phone. I know this isn't sustainable in the long term, but I'm trying to make the most of it while I remain at the dusk of childhood, before responsibility forces my hand. Still, I thought I'd share a couple anecdotes and logistical things because I've seen a lot of people talking about "dumb phones", but no one talking about no phone at all.
Logistics:
When I need to call my parents, I use the phone of a friend or professor. When I need to call some organization, I just use my dad's number
Copy down directions a quick map on desktop before leaving the house if I'm going someplace new
Do everything school related on laptop
That's kind of it... it's been so much easier than I thought it would be. I guess it makes sense, most people had a time in their lives where they got by just fine this way. Many remember a time where everyone did (I don't—I was born in the year of the iPhone). It's been delightful enough that I've begun to dread returning to a mobile phone, even if it's just a flip phone.
Some anecdotes:
I've been reading a lot more (a LOT more—too much. I've been neglecting studying a little in favor of reading). I'm reading The Secret History and a collection of Thoreau's essays and Night Train to Lisbon now. I like going to the park with just a book and enjoying the June weather with nothing else demanding my attention
Now my downtime feels more restful than it ever has, and it makes me feel like I never rested in my previous adolescence. I think having a device like a smartphone on you at all times is kind of exhausting, like a cursed amulet that feeds off your internal struggle to not be on it all the time... or something
I've spent way more time outside just zoning out and staring at trees and flowers and the fan on a side of a building doing absolutely nothing. and my head feels clearer doing this
I drafted a 2000 word essay for my English class in a leuchtturm journal. I sat in my high school library for two hours with a giant dictionary on right and a thesaurus to my left. The librarian then gave me the thesaurus, saying I was "the only person to have used it in ages. Actually, it's already been removed from our catalogue..."
I heard that some people are talking about a "no phone summer" or "low tech summer" and so this is my two cents on that. If you're my age and can't imagine life without a phone, maybe you should shut it down for a week and see what happens. My friends still like me and I see them often. Probably more often now that I can't text them (I've told them all to just email me 😭). So much of younger gen z are on their phones near constantly (I was no exception, with my 5-8 hours of it) and I worry what happens when we're never properly alone with our thoughts. I think high schoolers can take a week or a month or maybe even a year off and learn a lot about who they are. I don't know, I'm not anti tech, I just hope we don't waste away our whole lives like this. I feel bad for how much of my childhood I spent doing nothing on a phone, and it's only in the past few months that I finally feel free from this tug of having everything all the time.
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So I have this box. It's 29x40x22 cm, cardboard, I got it on a trip to Bunnings. And I'm only allowed to consume media that's literally in or represented in that box. For the whole month. No social media, no YouTube, nothing else. I'm allowed to add things into the box part way through, but I'm not allowed to take them out once they're in (except to use them, of course, but then they go back in the box).
I am allowed to use my phone/iPad/computer, but only for the media I've specified and put a placeholder in the box for, work, creative things (which means I can use Pinterest and Canva, as well as make posts on here as long as I don't use my dashboard), and checking in on my Etsy shop. To do this, I've put every social media or other content app (like my e reader app) into a folder so they're out of the way AND used one sec or Cold Turkey to block websites I don't want to use.
Why?
I don't think I value media enough. It's so convenient to me all the time, I just take it for granted, and I don't like that. I want to feel like the work that so many people put in to create these works means more to me than just the next cheap dopamine hit. This isn't a long term solution, but it'll hopefully give me a new perspective on media as a concept.
What's in the box?
Music
(V=LP vinyl, C=cassette tape)
V Bears in Trees - How to Build an Ocean: Instructions
C Bears in Trees mixtape
C Billy Bragg mixtape (to rock out to)
C Billy Bragg mixtape (to sit contemplatively/cry to)
V Billy Bragg - Worker's Playtime
C Coffee with Harvey
C Discarded Doll / Boot Up, Bitch (sides A and B, but separate mixes)
C Eu/Dysphoria / The People's Folk (sides A and B, but separate mixes)
V I Don't Know How But They Found Me - Razzmatazz
V Carole King - Tapestry
V The Mamas and the Papas - If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears
C The Nonstick Pans - Nineteen Sixty Four
V The Oh Hellos - Notos / Eurus
V The Oh Hellos - Boreas / Zephyrus
V Panic! at the Disco - Pretty. Odd.
V Simon and Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water
V Simon and Garfunkel - Sounds of Silence
V The Young Veins - Take A Vacation
Books
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction
The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
Good Girl, Bad Blood (Holly Jackson)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
my handwritten recipe book (I got the recipes from social media)
Other
Season 1 of Gilmore Girls (represented by an old video game case)
Season 2 of Gilmore Girls (represented by an old video game case)
Duolingo (represented by an old video game case)
Stardew Valley (represented by an old video game case)
a 1000 piece puzzle
a deck of cards
my tarot deck (mostly for visual art purposes)
Somehow, there's still a fair bit of space in there. Maybe one day I'll go to the library and pick up some more books, I don't know.
See you on the other side! I'll almost certainly be making posts during this time, but they might be about boring hyperspecific topics considering I won't be exposed to anything new.
When I got a dumbphone/flipphone, I immediately started living a super cool super fulfilling life! I travelled a ton, ran a marathon, immediately got good at art, read 4 books in a day, and now have 22 close friends! Thats exactly how it works, i'm not lying AT ALL, trust me ;)
...ahhh okay you got me, thats not actually what happened.
Yes my life did change, and all for the better! I do have a cooler and more fulfilling life now, but not like that, I just started living a regular life? This little post is about what that looks like these days (for me)
First, a little bit of math. My screen time with a smartphone was 5.5 hours on a good day and almost 9 on a bad: about an average of 7.25 hours a day. Ive been smartphone-less for a little over about 5 months; just about 170 days.
Average 7.25/hrs a day x 170 days = 1232.5 hours total/24hrs
51 full 24-hour days I got back.
ALMOST TWO MONTHS OUT OF THE FIVE
- Alright, i've never done that math before, holy shiitake mushrooms thats insane. Back on topic, oh my god I would have spent 2 months out of the past 5 entirely on my phone
What do I do instead? What consumes the hours? Or the in-passing minutes?
I live normally, just without a phone honestly, it didn't make me suddenly want to run a marathon or just turn into Picasso day one. It just gave me back the opportunity to live.
I turned to my hobbies, like ceramics, reading, journalling to bring the simple joys back into my everyday!
I stopped being able to distract myself from how icky I felt when I didn't move my body, so I slowly started swimming again!
I started to blog a little! Thanks for reading :D
I got bored at home, so I started seeking out social spaces and hanging out in person with friends and prioritizing making them!
Those are huge things, really big, hour by hour things that take up my life now. I am still a student, in a demanding major, who tries to study 5 hours a day, and I work part-time. Is that the most prominent change? Absolutely, but in the minutes passing between tasks, before I leave somewhere, waiting for something there is also a little mojo added back into my day. I would have been spending those little snippets of time pacifying myself on a quick scroll, 20-30 reels on IG that I would never remember. Instead those morsels are spent...
Doing nothing! Sitting around is a forgotten joy, don't be afraid to be alone with yourself, its the only way you will get to know you.
Sudoku! If i've got 5-10 mins waiting somewhere and feel up for the task, a quick sudoku from the little book I carry around is great.
Tidying up/cleaning! I mentioned this in a past blog post, but it's easier to keep the space around you tidy when you reclaim those little minuets while your breakfast is cooking or your waiting for the water to boil. Bagel still in the toaster? Why not give the kitchen a quick sweep! Coffee is steeping? Wouldn't you know it, thats how long it takes for me to unload the dishwasher! (still a student living at home, that dishwasher is a FULL 4-person dishwasher man)
People watching, takin' a quick ol' gander at your surroundings. Make sure you haven't forgotten what life looks like, or what the general population is up to.
I still spend some time on Tumblr, Reddit, and Pinterest, its not like I went cold turkey or that I'll never see social media again. Its easier to live your life when you have the time, and its easier to have the time when you don't have a monster algorithm in your pocket built to addict you. You can do it! Do it at the pace that is good for you, but get those two months back!
Absolutely no one and nothing needs an IMMEDIATE response unless it’s an emergency or a work related situation (focus modes exist that allow only certain notifications to go through for this purpose)
Getting to a text or notification in 15 minutes versus 2 hours changes absolutely nothing about the outcome of a situation
You forget 80% of what you scrolled through at the end of the day
There’s absolutely no image on Pinterest, no post on Tumblr, no story on Instagram that could be as novel as reading a book you’ve never read and the dopamine release from finishing it and soaking it in
it can literally wait. It’s not the end of the world. Your brain will make it seem that way but it’s not
Phones are built like slot machines (same exact mechanism) so don’t be too hard on yourself
But also consider how much progress you’d make in your goals if you siphoned some of that screen time into whatever goals you’ve had forever
you don’t need to live a no phone lifestyle, it’s about portions
it will feel so fulfilling when it’s under moderation
Actually Steven Moffat is basically just this sentiment given human form.
A version of this happened with The Magicians, tbh. Though instead of expectation: men, reality: women it was expectation: smug nihilists, reality: mentally ill queer folks.
Arguably Game of Thrones.
If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.
In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.
They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.
And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.
It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.
Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.
And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.
Young Justice
Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don’t want largely female audiences
#WhereIsRey (initial)
#WhereIsRey (ongoing)
The older, male generation of 'Star Wars' fans may be losing interest in the franchise, but female fans are stepping up.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was designed to be the opposite of The Last Jedi
#SONS OF ANARCHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!#LITERALLY SONS OF ANARCHY IS THE BIGGEST EXAMPLE OF THIS LIKE EVER#kurt sutter wrote that show for MEN and ended up with an overwhelmingly female audience#because he’s actually a good writer and knows how to develop characters well and wrote excellent female characters#but once he realized that his audience was almost entirely women he literally took it out on tara and gemma in the show#but like tara specifically#he resented her character for being a huge draw for female viewers so he tore her development to shreds and killed her#in the most brutal gut wrenching way possible#kurt sutter you will pay for your crimes#i actually wrote a manifesto about this on one of my old blogs i should try to find it sldkjsldfjsdljf#long post (via@m-oonknight)
OMG YES. I LOVED Sons of Anarchy, especially the women and then I got to season 6 and it was like - everything was just tossed in the trash? And like, why did Sutter hate that Tara drew tons of attention? That should have been a good thing! He should have been like “Hey folks, this girl’s getting us more viewers, let’s put her in more scenes!” It just doesn’t make sense to me. MEN don’t make sense to me.
The 100 too. I’ll never forget how Jason Rothenberg would attacked female fans on Twitter and mock them in interviews, and then post links to male fan discussions on Reddit to praise and thank them. In his goodbye letter to the show he SPECIFICALLY thanked Reddit and it was so disgusting.
Star Trek from TNG on was also a boy’s club, even though the TOS fans were mostly women. Women, in fact, who literally created modern fandom with their zines. But after TNG it was all, “Women don’t understand Star Trek, only smart men hur dur.”
(though it could probably start to make some sense if you follow the money past audience bases to maybe a couple of investors or like a rich patron … 🤔)
Stooooop I just wrote a masters thesis on this shit. Media creation and distribution is a means by which dominant power structures consolidate their hegemony. Dominantly situated creators get upset when the audience they attract isn’t the audience they wanted, because they view the whole creation and sharing of the fiction as an exercise to sustain kyriarchal conditions that benefit themselves. When the audience is Other, they see it as a failure of those efforts and lash out.
Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.
(anyway if anyone wants to read 35k words of philosophy about this, hmu)
I think a lot about an interview I heard with Bo Burnham a few years ago, where he talks about this phenomenon with his own work. He gained a large audience of teenage girls, and people in comedy spaces would look down on him for that or say what a shame it was, but he responded differently:
“The real truth is, I would perform my show and I would meet kids after and young girls would come up to me and they understood what I was expressing in that bit onstage way more than guys my own age. Way more. So if there was a bridge between us that I had to cross to write the movie [Eighth Grade], it was built to me by them. I felt understood by them before I presumed to understand them.”
Instead of trying to change his comedy, he decided to lean into and celebrate the audience that he actually had by making a movie specifically about the experiences of a teenage girl. It’s fascinating to hear him talk about how he got there, but also to acknowledge how rare that reaction is.
The idea that if you hook an 8-year-old boy you have him as a customer for life is baked into a lot of media, while completely ignoring the reality that adult women with no kids have more disposable income and therefore the 18 to 35 female demographic is more profitable for everyone. and in fact women do buy big ticket items like cars. It’s just that the rest of the world is still running 80 years behind reality and it’s really fucking annoying. anyway that’s why people sent bras to Bonnie Hammer to prove that women watched farScape.
He didn’t like fans some of whom were women sending his 10 YEAR OLD SON DEATH THREATS ON TWITTER because he didn’t make a ship canon.
But sure. The guy who hired more female/queer writers and directors then any other show runner in Doctor Who totally hates the fans and is an evil misogynist.
One day the Doctor Who and Sherlock fandoms will take responsibility for their own bad behavior instead of blaming Moffat. I’m not holding my breath.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Not that I think all marriages are doomed but when deciding who to marry you should ask yourself “is this someone I’d want to divorce?” As in, is this someone I believe would be mature and fair, even when they’re upset and don’t particularly like me at the moment. Is this someone I could continue to trust while going through an adversarial process? And if the answer is no, don’t marry them.
“scientists don’t want you know” is a phrase that always cracks me up because if you actually meet a scientist they will be shaking and crying like an overstimulated chihuahua with the need to let you know
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
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