I have no idea what I'm doing.

MORE than in the sense of "you shouldn't do that." I think most rational adults can agree that being parasocial is bad and obsessing over mistakes and poor taste and botched interactions is detrimental. Callout posts and anon hate and so on are bad. That's a given.

But I think the prevalence of that culture is negatively impacting even people that don't participate in it. Knowing there's a subset of people out there who WILL skewer you for the slightest infraction, or WILL hold an unforgivable grudge against you if they find out what you did years ago, has to make it REALLY FUCKING HARD to afford yourself any grace, right? Because there's that looming implication that you're damaged forever if you step a toe out of line.

And I think that's what leads to people having a panic attack about being wrong about something. Or being called out for bigotry. And maybe also contributes to the whole hyper-aggressive protectiveness of characters and media you identify with. Like, ideally, you admit you were wrong, you grow up, you move on. But how do you do that if you've got this deep-seated fear that if the people you cared about found out, they might be part of that unforgivable-grudge-holding subset?

Because publishing houses will not continue printing paper books if libraries are their only customers.

college junior: sorry but like. i have 69 cents in my saving account and this place has in-unit laundry in the basement???

We need to start commenting under other people's posts about how to properly warn for flashing lights and eyestrain. We need to be emailing and calling companies about their possibly triggering advertisements that could induce seizures. We need to stop tolerating ableism and start speaking up for the more vulnerable.

Also, stop putting epilepsy warnings. That's like saying "warning: schizophrenia" on a post including unreality or "warning: dyslexia" on a post with a typing quirk. First off, the disability mentioned isn't the only group of people that this could trigger. Second, it doesn't truly get the message across and instead makes it worse for those with the disability-- scrolling through the epilepsy tag on Tumblr should get you to view the content of other epileptic people, but no, you just get a bunch of flashing lights and eyestrain, even though you could instead tag for, oh I dunno, flashing lights and eyestrain.

and then on the day of the show, my friend asks, "where is the camera I requested?"

gallerist: "you didn't request a camera"

my friend: "I did, and you confirmed that you would have one here."

gallerist: "that isn't true."

and then she proceeded to pull up the email thread, and my friend could see that every single email they had sent had been summarized by AI, and that the gallerist had then had AI write a response to them based on the AI summary, and that the AI had detected that they needed a camera, and confirmed on behalf of the gallerist that they would bring a camera, but because the gallerist had offloaded the work of actually reading and responding, she simply hadn't actually made any note of it herself, therefore didn't bring it, nor did she even know one was needed.

THE GAANG

(and no longer are they those little kids...)

Avatar: Aang, the Last Airbender