*shrugs* ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“Is the future going to be all girl?” “We can only hope.”

1) fat

2) chubby

Tumblr just helped me get my daughter’s giant beanbag chair up 3 flights of stairs and I would like to talk about that for a moment because it seems to me to encapsulate something about what makes this platform valuable that isn’t about the pr0n.

So, we bought this giant beanbag thing from an online company that makes them and I think it’s gonna be pretty boss. But it’s huge. It’s nae so much a chair as a kind of giant beanbag oblong which can be shaped into whatever but also just be a kind of substitute couch or bed for flopping on. It’s about 6 feet long but it only weighs about 20 pounds. 

This is not the kind of thing you can have just left on the stoop of your condo building, and we don’t have a doorman, so it was shipped to Mrs. P’s office. I went to pick it up there today. It comes in a huge cardboard box about 4 feet tall and many feet around. Even giving it the most enthusiastic possible embrace, it’s impossible to really wrap your arms around it well enough to pick it up and carry it very far. We managed to shove it into the back of the car and I drove home, very carefully.

Mrs. P told me we’d ahve to wait till she got home to bring it up the stairs together. I got home and said hell with that, with this thing in the car I can’t see out the back and I have errands to do. So I dragged it out of the car and thought, OK, how do I move this thing across the parking lot?

And then I remembered this tumblr post about a theory developed by anthropologists that the Easter Island statues had been “walked” into their places by rocking them from side to side on their bases:

I realized I could do that with this box. I just walked it forward on its two front corners, swaying from side to side behind it in sync with it, and I got it to the door that way; and then I walked it most of the way up the stairs (sometimes I had to resort to other methods to get it round the turns).

I searched for the post because I wanted to link to it; and I found the video embedded in a “did you know” factoid thing put out by a site that generates this stuff and then funnels it into tumblr through its account. But by the time this video got to me, there was a whole discussion on it about this theory, about the relationship between indigenous tradition and this theory, about the phenomenon of Western observers “discovering” knowledge which was not actually “lost” but merely unavailable or incomprehensible to them because of their own thought and belief structures, and so on. You know how these things go. I would not have remembered that post in the original factoid form; but I remembered the conversation around it, because that was interesting to me.

I would never have gone looking for this information. It came across my dashboard because someone I followed reblogged it. They probably didn’t go looking for it either. It got to me through a very long chain of people who had some shit to say about this and wanted to say it, linked for long stretches by people who had nothign to say about it but thought it was interesting. It got to me through a series of human interactions assisted, but not wholly driven, by technology.

With the consolidation of platforms in corporate hands, content is more and more curated for us, by humans or by algorithms, before it gets to us. Algorithms learn to give us more of what we are already looking for. They have a tendency to narrow our social media experience, to send us in a very intense journey down a fairly narrow rabbit hole. On tumblr, weird shit just floats across the transom all the time; and maybe 75% is just pretty or irrelevant/incomprehensible, but the other 25% will include shit you didn’t know you needed, but now find awesome. 

You can also hear the consistent, B-flat humming of the moon every night and you understand what it’s trying to convey.

You met an angel in the parking lot of Burger King who gave you a soda and a meaningful look before dissolving into flames.

You have distinct memories of watching The Video on the internet that you can determine, through the shared experiences of other, undoubtedly existed, yet not even a mention of it can be found anymore.

Bill Murray has appeared in your house, took all of the legs off of your chairs without saying a word or breaking eye contact, and left. You’re not sure how he got in or out. All of your doors were locked.

You have reached the edges of the Program where you could see the earth dissolve into pixels and strings of binary, momentarily before They re-calibrated it and a simple street materialized in front of you.

You lie awake at night unable to sleep because your mind is full, wondering what horrors might exist in the vast jaws of space that your mind has not evolved to comprehending yet.

Poppy has c

You heard a conversation occurring in your house knowing you were the only person home. When you investigate your animals lock eyes with you, sitting still and scared like wide eyed statues until you leave.

You haven’t found the heart to tell your mother that her boyfriend of 4 years is really just a sack of potatoes in a child sized tuxedo. She is happy for the first time in years, you think you will just keep it to yourself.

No one believes you about the small red cow that seems to live on your nightstand. The cow mocks you about this fact. That is the only thing the cow does. The nightstand emits a loud noise when you attempt to remove it.

Wherever you go you always here the faintest loop of 99 Red Balloons by Nena that seems to play in the distance. It never sounds any closer or farther, though some days it is in German.