#context collapse

Jake: Conspiracy theory mongering

Openly posts about secret alien cabals taking over world governments in the hope of finding more ex-controllers

Tells anyone who will listen that Jacques Chirac has been replaced by a brain worm

Argues back with the critics instead of just ignoring them, because he actually wants to persuade people

Rachel: Defending Monica Lewinsky

This involves a lot of dunking on Bill Clinton's outfits — obviously he's too ugly and unfashionable to attract girlfriends the normal way, so he's gotta be a creep about it

Just when the Hillary Clinton haters think they've won Rachel to their side, she makes a bunch of posts defending the first lady too

Ax: Misinformation

Confidently informs AIMers that cigarette butts are a delicious food, that the best cure for a bad day is eating wood pulp, and that there are no negative consequences to eating 28 mega-sized cinnamon buns in one sitting

Will be extremely condescending toward anyone who dares disagree with these takes

Marco: Trolling

You know the guy who posted photos of shrimp tails in his Cap'n Crunch? That's Marco, every day, all the time.

@The_Sharing I went to one of your events recently, and the paper towel dispenser was full of live slugs! [badly photoshopped image attached]

@BuyersResearchInstitute How come one of your salespeople gave ME, an underage impressionable child, a pack of cigarettes as a promotional item?!?!?

@FormatCeeColon Please listen to the attached audio file and confirm or deny that your song has the line "drink nail polish remover" hidden under the coda.

Tobias: Disagreeing with the internet's Bird Takes

Owls are NOT "sky cats," they're wild animals that don't belong inside EVER under any circumstances I don't care how much you like Harry Potter; that is a work of fiction

Crows are intelligent, but stories of them learning language, finance, or manipulation are anthropomorphism

Vultures are great, actually, they're really important for preventing waste from poisoning groundwater, and it's your own discomfort with death that's causing you to call them ugly

Parrots are smart, yes, but they do not "learn language;" they skillfully imitate sounds and assuming they speak English is anthropomorphism.

Pigeons are GIFT to the UNIVERSE. However, don't feed them.

Birds. Do NOT. Give Hugs. Every photo you've ever seen of a goose or swan or parakeet "hugging" someone is a bird with serious balance problems (from anesthesia, from brain damage, from blindness) holding itself up with its wings around the nearest vertical object. Anth. Ro. Po. Morph. Ism. Birds show affection by grooming each other, OBVIOUSLY; how would the logistics of a hug even work in the wild?

Cockatoos should bathe in chocolate fountains. As a treat.

Cassie: Related to Tobias, but ruining All the cute animal vids

Sample takes include: "a human house is not a safe place for an otter," "a human house is not a safe place for a fox," "a human house is not a safe place for a chimpanzee," and "a human house is not a safe place for a pigeon."

online, that structure breaks. every post has to withstand interpretation from people who know you intimately and people who know nothing about you. strangers, future employers, classmates from ten years ago—they all witness the same behavior without sharing the same history. there’s no adjusting, no calibrating, no choosing which version of yourself is appropriate. the performance has a single stage and infinite judges.

as a result, authenticity doesn’t get stronger—it gets flattened. the “real you” becomes a median of public expectation: a self designed to avoid misinterpretation by the widest possible audience. the consequence is subtle and exhausting: you start managing perception at the expense of expression. identity becomes defensive. you’re not communicating who you are; you’re pre-emptively correcting what people might assume.

The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme

“this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.”

There are a lot of consequential and important things going on. Not only is today Super Tuesday, but Americans are on edge about the spread of the novel coronavirus that could reach pandemic proportions.

But if you consume your news on Facebook, the biggest news of the day has to do with Hillary Clinton’s emails. Yes, really.

According to data compiled by CrowdTangle, the most total interactions on Facebook came on a Fox News article about a federal judge granting a request from a right-wing group named Judicial Watch to make Clinton sit for a sworn deposition about her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

[...]

What you won’t find in Facebook’s top 20 news stories, however, is Super Tuesday coverage, anything published by a left-of-center outlet, or anything that’s critical of President Donald Trump or his administration.

[...]

What explains the predominance of right-wing outlets on Facebook? According to Judd Legum, who reports extensively on Facebook in his Popular Information newsletter, part of the answer has to do with the sort of content that’s optimized for Facebook.

“Facebook is optimized for Trump supporters,” Legum wrote in a direct message. “It rewards engagement, which mostly reflects an emotional reaction to things. Support for Trump is largely emotional, not factual. So pro-Trump content does very very well.”

...hello, helpful anon! Allow me to gently suggest that perhaps you should’ve made use of this feature to check the timestamp on whichever post you’re referring to. Because I have zero memory of it, except the most general “Tumblr’s lack of functionality is a recurring bitchfest on this blog.” The best guess I can find--with Google, after Tumblr’s hot-garbage excuse for full-text blog search came up empty--is several posts deep in a reblog conversation from over three years ago.

I did actually notice a few months back that hovering over the permalink now includes a timestamp. But if a power user who’s been on the site since 2011, and has enough of a need for dash timestamps to repeatedly bitch about the lack of them, spends the better part of eight years thinking they aren’t available--and eventually turns to aftermarket extensions written by other power users to fill the same perceived gap--that suggests one of two things:

1. The UX is such a dumpster fire that basic features aren’t discoverable even to highly motivated users who are trying to find them, not even by years’ worth of word of mouth, meaning that in the grand scheme of things they might as well not exist

2. Or, far more likely, they only got around to adding it recently. Meaning whichever post you’re referring to was accurate at the time of posting. In which case, yes, PSA to followers, you can now wrestle a timestamp out of your Tumblr dash without XKit by hovering over the little dog-ear where the permalink lives! Truly we are living in the future.