It's great to be alive with you

It's a very mainstream thought nowadays: grandmas doing wacky stuff mean's she's a cool old lady living her life to the fullest, mom's doing wacky stuff is 'ew, stop embarrassing me'.

They are all living their life to the fullest, tho.

begin with “buckle your seatbelts, motherfuckers, because in eight short pages i am going to learn u a thing that i only learned myself about two hours ago, so sit down, shut up, and enjoy the experience of my 4-am-redbull-induced-self-hatred-fuelled-writing-extravaganza”

Seeing it cross my dash again years later, when teaching college students how to write papers is my full-time job, i think it apropos to put on my Authority Hat for a moment and tell y’all, in my role as an instructor of college English courses, where I think this post gets it wrong:

Let's talk about why you see those checkmarks and why I don't hide them.

Mostly, you can read it here.

I understand we like to hunt people who express cringe ideas for sport, because it's a great 30-second sop to mop away the powerlessness that we all feel in modern late stage capitalism. That's a fantastic way to end up bitter, alone, and hollow - I've sure seen that play out over the years.

The current owner of tumblr sure seems to me to be a slop-addled egomaniac who's increasing irrelevance in the world of tech is eroding the myth that most tech ceo's have propped their egos up with - which wouldn't matter if the fallout didn't happen to land on so many people (and so many of those disproportionately trans). The best damning endorsement I can give is that he's a social network CEO that isn't throwing nazi salutes at fascist rallies or gutting public policy that will kill millions more or inciting racist pogroms, all as part of trying to find relevance. It sure puts a dirty fucking smog over all of this.

But also, you don't have tumblr at home. You don't have it anywhere else. Separate from what you may think of the owner of this site, it's a fucking wonder and miracle that this weird funky garden still exists at all in the endless suburban hell of green monoculture lawns on all side. And when it gets paved over for shareholder reasons or some other bullshit, there's not gonna be anything on the sides or periphery that will re-seed it elsewhere.

The days where another social network site that will let even half the shit we yell about here, with any reasonable large group interaction, are over.

I haven't grabbed any new checkmarks in a couple of years. But I'm not deleting them either, because this is all we really have left. I remember the boxed in and narrow fucking world before the internet, before dial up BBS's. Nobody knew shit about fuck, and it sucked and that's where we're getting herded in the direction of.