Confidently Queer, Surprisingly Near

Look

At

Them

Are you seriously going to tell me that two girls who live together ALONE out in the country, far away from society, ARENT GAY????

LOOK AT THEM!!! LOOK HOW ALEXA IS LOOKING AT HER!!! And then there is this scene

and im just…out of words

look at them go, ridding away on a FREAKING RAINBOW from their supposed “love interests” (who are literrally the same dude, come on). And you know what they did in the end? They didnt stay at the castle with the guys, no no, they went back to their little house on the country and continued selling flowers!!!!

Polo: character knows how to ride a horse expertly

Polo Sport: +4 on Skill Check (Sport)

Drakkar: the spirit of Drakkar, a long-dead Barbarian chieftan, advises on battle tactics, +1 on all melee weapons, and the use of Barbarian’s Rage.

Eternity: as if affected by the Foresight spell: can’t be surprised and has advantage on Attack rolls, Ability Checks, and saving throws. Additionally, other creatures have disadvantage on Attack rolls against the target for the Duration.

So then why do you suppose Reddit and Tumblr did wind up going in the directions they did? It may come down to incidental factors regarding the founders and initial members, but I’d be fascinated to know this aspect of their history. I’m thinking of bringing this up on the next major SSC open thread.

I can only speculate, but there are a few culprits I’d finger. The first is that Tumblr tried to pitch itself as more of a multimedia site while reddit tried to pitch itself as more of a text-based discussion site, which is a much more obvious thing to look for when you’re trying to pick what platform to use personally. Voting is also useful to cut out the “noise”, which was part of reddit’s original pitch – like, even if you’re using Tumblr for open debate, you’re still going to get a 10 randos calling you names for everyone who says something interesting  The problem is that norms of decorum tend to get confounded with other norms in practice, which seems intractable once your userbase is too large to fit in a van. By comparison, Tumblr seems to mostly have been intended for “curatorial” tumblogging – the reason I tag random aesthetic/joke reblogs as “scrapbooking” is because that’s what it reminds me of. And it’s good for that – the problems turn up when you want to discuss things.

But there’s also a population effect. Both sites had a growth-first model in which they underwent a period of massive early expansion, and in both cases those periods solidified the site culture and associated stereotypes. reddit made a big deal out of free speech in this period, and it was positioning itself in the lineage of Usenet, slashdot, and freenode IRC, which primed with as a mixture of freedom-loving Unixbeard techies and people who wanted to express controversial opinions.That cohort has entrenched farther into “reddity” positions as the broader culture becomes more antipathetic toward them.

By comparison, Tumblr was positioning itself as a Pinterest type of site, and its userbase was a mix of the kind of person who uses Pinterest and Livejournal diaspora. It was angling itself heavily as a place for fandom and aesthetic posting, so it drew a crowd of school- and university-age fandom dorks with an art/humanities slant. Still nerds, but a different genus. The “Tumblr culture” developed on Tumblr rather than being inherited from its forebears, but it followed changes happening with the same demographic in the broader culture. In particular, I think, the focus on message control, identity politics and safe spaces links in with the influence of the university left on the site”s early userbase, because you have a lot of people there whose main experience of doing adult things and dealing with adult issues is in a cloistered environment where people puts a lot of value on activism for its own sake.

Specifically, the structure of each site in some way mitigates the cost of their beliefs.

People on reddit (in this very rough cliche) care a great deal about championing free speech and heterodox thinking… which is a lot easier to say when actually all your time is spent reading highly upvoted comments on intensely regulated subforums. Trumpies on r/thedonald can talk about not silencing anyone to their heart’s content, so long as the mods and downvotes are doing that dirty work for them.

To a lesser degree, people on tumblr can support the goal of hiding away from all the bad things in the world, while still being fairly informed about the news affecting their cause, because of all the oppositional reblogs they see. So their writing continues to be (somewhat) relevant and American-Chopper-style-engaging in a way that intensely cut off subreddits aren’t.

emily was catholic and found it really, really important that you knew that

she was discrete for the most part (sign of the cross before meals and blushing when the lord’s name was said in vain sorts of things) but she had a habit of berating people for politely declining her invitations to her church services and was sort of a pain in the ass about it at times but that’s beside the point 

we were friends for about two and a half years

and then she borrowed a pair of my jeans.

now these jeans 

were not just any pair of jeans 

they were lucky brand jeans and the nicest jeans I owned at the time, but I was always cool with letting people borrow things when they really needed them 

so this fateful day rolls around and emily is freaking out because she tore her skirt (as in straight up the back, mortifyingly torn) while we were out for coffee waiting for her other friend to pick her up because she was going on a weekend trip with this other friend’s (even more religious) family and her only other option was a pair of starchy pants that would absolutely suck to sit comfortably in for a five hour drive

so I do what any good friend would do and give her the extra pair of jeans I have in my car

which are my luckys

now I didn’t think anything of it and just assumed I’d done a great service here right 

but flash forward three days 

and she comes back 

and doesn’t say 

anything 

just hands me the jeans 

pivots 

and walks away 

so naturally I’m like??????????

so she proceeds to send me a text the next day saying that I made her look horrible to her friend’s mom because she nicely offered to wash the jeans before returning them and that’s right around the time I remember that Lucky brand jeans  have a lovely little note on the fly

they look like this

and then you unzip them and

quoth the crow