#metablogging

yes you are a respected professional in your chosen field. extremely competent and intelligent. giving off general vibes of adult normalcy

If you dont remember;ı was the guy who called congratulated on making the "one of the lamest self inserts in SCP wiki." And then you blocked me. And then a fan art was made based on that comment of mine, which really flattered me. But know that ı still am very **fucking pissed** off over that. Like, dude, people probably called you something worse than that, but the thing that ticked you off was being called lame ? Grow a back bone, cause your ego might crush the lower part of your body.

I will block anyone for any reason (including being mildly annoying in my notes) and never apologize for anything.

But hey, listen, this happened months ago, and if you remembered and made this alt account to send this ask, I think you might actually be upset and not purely trolling. So let me try to respond from the heart and give you some advice:

I think you have a way of looking at social media that is going to cause harm to you over time. I'm a very small-scale internet celebrity, which is awesome, and it is objectively and genuinely cool that you have opinions about something I made! And it's cool that you got fanart! But I'm also just a person out here using the internet for fun. There might be more nuance here if we were friends or neighbors, or if I were in some kind of position of significant power over you, but in reality, as a person I once saw leave an annoying comment on my tumblr post, I don't know you and I have no responsibility to interact with you.

There are a lot of people on the internet who are beacons of hate. I spent a lot of time on 4chan as a teenager, I would know. And the internet of my teenage years was actually better equipped to deal with this - we had a word for that, "trolling", and we had a protocol in place: "don't feed the trolls."

And on one hand, this leads to value judgments - a lot of people who you might snap-judge as a troll aren't doing this just to get a rise out of you, they might actually be in a really bad place or have a legitimate complaint or have a different cultural background or communication style. Maybe you're one of these. But "don't feed the trolls" is still a good heuristic to follow:

A) a lot of trolls will also pretend to be legitimately suffering or just bad at communicating, and will use this to further exploit your goodwill

B) If everyone knows you don't feed people who look like they're trolling, everyone gets pushed towards being polite. It's obvious if you understand decision theory.

These days, it seems like people feel a lot less agency over the internet - and some of this is valid, social media is vastly more engaging in sort of a predatory way than the forums of my youth, algorithmic feeds are widespread, etc. But the truth is every time you log onto the internet, you have a choice about what to look at. You can quit using some app. You can close the tab. You can look at something else, or unfriend that person, or report that scam.

Blocking is, for me and many many others, a tool for that. I like some things about tumblr, but I take active steps to just see things I want to see, because it's my life and I use this website for fun. And that includes blocking trolls or people who are indistinguishable from trolls.

You might take this as permission to do the same - you don't have to talk to annoying strangers for fun!

Think about it this way: what do you want out of tumblr? If that includes being part of a community, then how do you make an internet community that's good, when different people want different things?

And it can feel bad to realize you've annoyed someone else or they don't want you in there space or they've blocked you - like, 100%, I feel a biting shame over stuff like that. But I don't endorse that shame. Other people are out there growing their own gardens and you gotta roll with it. Maybe you made a bad impression, or maybe they're odious and unpleasant and petty - or maybe some kind of relationship there was never going to work out and they just realized it first. Who knows. You each have to curate your garden in your own way or else you're going to drown in the weeds.

They were barely teaching government classes by the time I got to high school, but either these people just straight up slept through it or those classes don't exist anymore, I'm not sure which.

It's no wonder the MAGAts are trying to take down PBS, though.

Can't have any free (publicly funded, gasp!) educational programming out there, people might get organized and learn how to do something more useful than screeching online about how horrible everything is.

Nope. Can't have that.

Anyway, I'm going to keep collecting explainers and other useful breakdown stuff under #Civics 099, because I could use the refresher and other people might find it useful in targeting their efforts.

Edit: The tag "how to help" might also be of interest, and anything about Donnie himself is tagged "His Fraudulency".

Um. It says reblogs are turned off for my temperature poll. But I did not turn them off. And I have successfully reblogged the post myself since seeing that notification.

So I logged into an older account I have, then clicked the drafts folder. I found a draft of an email from 2017.