Stuff I Liked Once

He asked us one hot summer day how to measure an evil. How do you measure the Holocaust? the genocide of the Native Americans? American slavery? a massacre? We, a bunch of kids whose brains hadn’t finished growing in yet, were mildly stumped. It wasn’t the number of the dead, we were told. Instead, we were told to imagine the following:

You’re standing on a street corner. There is a line of people in front of you. One by one, they introduce themselves to you. One by one, you learn names and what they did, maybe a hobby, maybe how many siblings or kids or nephews they had. One by one, you heard about talents or hobbies, what they did on their last holiday. One by one, you meet those who were lost.

This is how you measure an evil, my professor taught us. You measure not the number, but the individuals lost. Not just the names, but who they were, their connections to others. What is lost is an irreplaceable human being. The evil is measured not in the number, but in the who was lost. All of those whos matter. Every life listed above and listed on other pages mattered. Losing them hurts all of us. We lost nearly 100,000 irreplaceable human beings. This did not have to happen. That is the measure of the evil of “it’ll all just go away”.

May their memories be a blessing to those who knew them and mourn them. May they Rest In Peace. May we never forget they were living, breathing human beings whose lives were important and mattered. May we never allow negligence, nepotism, greed, racism, ageism, ableism, and incompetence to do this to us again.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “But there’s a full stop as part of the question mark!”

She nodded gravely. “I know!” she said. “A lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, it’s still part of the sentence, so it’s wrong to capitalise it.”

Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food. 

Someone put red paint on the "Serve and Protect" sculpture at the Salt Lake City police building and it is such a powerful statement.

- There's actually nothing wrong fundamentally with hiring a cleaner. Being a cleaner is a job. It's not degrading to be a cleaner. I would advise maybe thinking about the relationship you have with your cleaner, if you're lucky enough to have one. Aim to be a good employer.

- The issue was, in fact, this (as Owen Jones pointed out in his original tweet, without mentioning women or men at all): You should be trying to avoid making your cleaner come to work during a pandemic. You should still aim to pay their wages. Making them choose between their job and their health is selfish.

- Unfortunately, all the UK's worst journalists AKA Sarah Ditum and Janice Turner specifically, decided this was sexist and anti-feminist to say somehow. Mainly because, they said, their husbands and their kids flat out refuse to tidy up their shit, even during these pretty out of the ordinary circumstances. So they had all this extra work to do.

- The answer to this, however, is not to exploit your (overwhelmingly female and working class) cleaner: the answer is to communicate with your husband and kids. Maybe they won't listen, and maybe we can discuss the wider subject of the gendered divide of household labour. But that does not mean you, a middle class woman, get to put your cleaner, a working class woman, at risk. They are not the solution to a lazy husband.

- Then comparisons were drawn between hiring a cleaner and hiring a sex worker. Why were men still allowed to hire a sex worker during the pandemic, some people said, and women were unable to hire a cleaner? The answer is: if any of these people bothered to support sex worker-led organisations like SWARM or Basis, they'd see that they are actively encouraging sex workers not to work, and for clients not to use them. They are raising money to subsidise their lost wages and to keep sex workers safe and healthy during this pandemic. Much like other jobs (except without the government assistance)! Because it would be wrong to put anyone under unnecessary risk! So it's actually wrong to both hire a sex worker and expect your cleaner to come to work now. Because both cleaners and sex workers deserve dignity, safety, and worker's rights. Glad we cleared that one up.

Tumblr deleted my long ass rant while I was in the middle of writing it so you’re spared and will only get a summed up version

Long story short; your abs are supposed to be covered with a healthy, protective layer of fat. The shape Jason Momoa is in during his movies is achieved by a diet designed to lower his body fat to unhealthy numbers, dehydrating him and enhancing his abs with make up. This is what ripped, muscular, healthy person looks like on their off time. If you think this is a dad bod, for the love of everything that is holy, shut up and absolutely never comment on a man’s body ever again. I mean hell, you can still see his damn v-line, what fucking dad bod has that?!

Don’t believe me? Google some bodybuilders who are off their contest diet. The men who literally make a living for having defined muscles. For 360 days a year, they do not look like the way you think they do. During a bodybuilding contest, these men’s body fat is under 7%, they’re dehydeated and covered in fake tan that helps the muscles show up. And it’s literally only for that day, because it’s extremely unhealthy. Same goes for actors who are known for being ripped - they’re at their worst when they’re filming. This exact same shit happened with Vin Diesel few years ago with people getting a paparazzi shot of his “beer belly” and I’m genuinely worried of the young men who grow up in this society thinking being muscular means having defined abs 24/7.

“This is what actors (& models & bodybuilders) do. If you see them with razor cut abs, they have been on a low carb, water-reducing diet to get there. You cannot retain that and be healthy. When we shot WOLVES, Jason asked me, “Do I have to have abs n’ shit for this?” I said no.”

-  David Hayter, director, Wolves

“The wood chopping scene in The Wolverine was all the footage they could get before Hugh Jackman passed out from dehydration. Dehydration and steroids are the big secret behind Hollywood muscle definition.”

-  My name is Grant‏

“Yeah there was a huge piece a few years ago about the prevalence of doping in the aftermath of Dark Knight (roughly), it became an arms race of every male actor going on roids for definition. Compare Jackman in XMen 1 from 2000 to him in Logan, for example.”

-  Kuff ‘n’ Klout

“The Hollywood roid phenomenon in one picture”

-  Kuff ‘n’ Klout‏

“The Guest” movie - 

“[…] some scenes and very muscular in others. Wingard and Barrett said that Stevens’ shirtless scene was one of the most important scenes in the movie because they knew it was going to be a major selling point and a sure-fire trailer shot and they spent more time shooting this scene than any other. Wingard said that he “wanted to sexually objectify and fetishize Dan Stevens’ shirtless body in this shot as it went with the playful nature of the movie where the audience was subversively being asked to ogle at the body of the bad boy character. The film-makers scheduled that scene as late as possible because they wanted Stevens’ body in “optimum condition”. In preparation for that scene, Stevens shaved his chest and tanned his body so that all his muscle definition could be seen. In addition, Wingard said that to deepen the muscle definition even further, the trainers had Stevens do a trick where he “Did not consume any food or water for a day, and then just before the shot, he drank a diet coke and did 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups”. This tightened up his muscles and made his veins stand out giving him the super-ripped appearance that the film-makers wanted. The shot was then subsequently used in all the trailers and publicity materials for the film.”

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans react to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

I think that what we’re experiencing now, as a reaction, is a resurgence of individual communities. More often than not these days, I see that individual fandoms or groups within fandoms have a Discord or other place to talk away from Tumblr.

I think that may also explain why some people tend to like more than they reblog. Reblogging means leaving yourself open to (often extremist/purity-motivated) criticism of your choices - or leaves the OP open to similar criticism from your followers, with you as the involuntary middleman whose reblog made that connection possible.

I absolutely pick my littles up. My point wasn’t “don’t pick them up ever”, it was “don’t just snatch them up and maybe your dog will stop biting you when you try”. 

I say frequently that I treat the little dogs like the bigs, and that’s absolutely true. Not a lot of difference between how I treated Tiki vs how I treat Creed. I’m one of those weirdos who does have the 80lb dog sit in my lap, I pick him up, I let him on the furniture, he lays on my chest and licks my face. Just like Tiki did. I picked her up all the time! But I only picked her up when she wanted to be, not just when I wanted a little dog in my arms.

I found two specific things to be true, learning Tiki.

First: initially, when I first got her, she was so used to spending time in someone’s arms that when I put her down on the floor and walked away from her, fully expecting her to toddle after me, she acted like she physically couldn’t follow me. She flail-crawled a couple steps, then gave up. Eventually, she stood up completely, and flail-walked crookedly towards me, slapping her feet and pasterns again the ground. It was as though she didn’t even know how to walk. Over the next few days, it was as though she remembered how to walk on her own… and then she no longer wanted to be up.

At that point I stopped picking her up unless she needed to be. She would ask to be allowed on the couch, to have attention, to navigate something too tall for her… but if I reached down to pick her up and help her, she’d back away from me or even turn and run. She wanted to do it herself. And she wanted to avoid the situation of her no longer having that freedom of moving her own body where she wanted it to go.

But then, second: when I gave her a signal for both up and down, everything changed again. Suddenly I could pick her up again, because I communicated that I was about to do so, and then would let her go the second I was done. Suddenly, she was asking to be up far more often. I made sure to watch for her up and down signals- learning she could ask to be down and I would actually put her down actually resulted in her wanting to be up for longer. She no longer had to choose between affection and freedom. She could have both, because I would listen to what she asked for.

But I absolutely held her! When she was tired from walking, if we weren’t about to be home, I’d scoop her up and carry her the rest of the way. When we went up or down stairs, because that was a skill she never quite mastered if there were more than 3. For meds, nail trims, tooth brushing, baths. To put her in her crate. To cuddle her close when she demanded attention. To help her onto the furniture she hadn’t quite figured out how to climb up herself. She slept cuddled against my chest, the majority of her body tucked under my chin where my neck meets my shoulders. She insisted on not only being held, but being swaddled and cuddled. She liked the affection.

And Creed does too- I joke that his favorite place is in my lap or snuggled into my side, because that’s where he insists on being at all points in time. He’s taller, so he stands for a lot of grooming things… but I also am not shy about picking him up, letting him crawl into my lap, asking him to jump into my arms. He knocks me on my ass half the time due to his size, but I still hold him too.